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Report: Downed Trees To Blame For Most Outages Following Freak October Snowstorm

HARTFORD, Conn. (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Downed trees rather than transmission system problems were largely to blame for widespread power outages during a freak October snowstorm last year, a report by federal regulators and a utility group said Thursday.

WCBS 880's Fran Schneidau reports

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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corp. also said inaccurate weather forecasts led utilities to initially rely on their own crews rather than call for mutual aid, delaying repair work.

The report said that in the Pennsylvania-to-Maine region, 74 transmission lines and 44 transmission substations experienced outages. Those problems caused less than 5 percent of customer outages at the peak of the Oct. 29-30 storm, which left more than 3.2 million homes and businesses without power.

The report said nearly three-quarters of the transmission line outages occurred when trees fell onto power lines, and that many of the trees are beyond utilities' rights-of-way.

Precise measures of the total physical damage to the electrical distribution systems are hard to determine, the report said. But it estimated that 50,000 locations across the Northeast required utility crews to remove trees or repair distribution lines.

The report did not address communications problems between utilities and municipalities. Jette Gebhart, a lawyer at the federal agency, told reporters on a conference call that the report focused on issues related to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's jurisdiction and the utility group's reliability standards.

The report also said emergency preparation and response are "almost entirely outside'' the regulators' jurisdiction.

Still, it said a review of the impact of utility preparation and response on restoring power "found no indication that inadequate preparation materially hindered restoration of transmission facilities'' that are larger and operating at a distance from trees.

The report instead said the problem was primarily with distribution lines, which operate in residential and commercial neighborhoods and were brought down by trees and branches.

Since the storm, utilities like Connecticut Light & Power have embarked on aggressive tree cutting programs in hopes of limiting the number of outages during big storms.

Earlier this year, 192,000 CL&P customers who lost power for a week or more from the October snowstorm received a credit of $140.22.

(TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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