Published: 11/15/2017 12:14:16 PM
NORTHAMPTON — Power has been restored to many areas across Hampshire County, but some residents remain without power for the moment.
“About 3,000 still” are without power from , said Robert Kievra of National Grid around 1 p.m. “We hope to have everyone back on within an hour.” About 1,700 of those people are in Northampton itself, and Kievra noted that Williamsburg customers are also affected.
Kievra said a feeder line from Eversource had shut down, causing the National Grid substation in the area to lose power.
Priscilla Ress, a spokeswoman for Eversource, said at 1 p.m. that all power to Eversource customers had been restored. The system, she said, is built with protection devices similar to large-scale circuit breakers, which shut down when a problem is detected. That’s what happened this morning.
“Power’s been back on to all our customers for close to an hour now,” Ress said.
A widespread power outage had knocked out power in several communities at around 9 a.m., including sections of Northampton, Easthampton, Southampton, Westhampton, Hadley and Amherst.
The City of Northampton said it was working with National Grid to identify the source of the outage and to restore power shortly after the outages occurred. At 10 a.m., the National Grid website listed the estimated time of restoration as 11 a.m. The site reported 4,989 customers affected in Northampton.
An Eversource outage map showed the following percentages of Eversource customers without power as of 10 a.m. (only those towns with more than 10 customers without power are listed):
Amherst, 5 percent of Eversource customers (479/10,294)
Easthampton, 80 percent (6,731 of 8,399)
Hadley, 10 percent (336 of 3,205)
Southampton, 74 percent (1,893 of 2,566)
Westhampton, 85 percent (713 of 838)
Easthampton Police reported that Eversource is working on restoring power in that city. Other area communities experiencing power loss are Chesterfield, Williamsburg, Goshen, Westfield and Holyoke.