Plainfield
“It’s been a pain,” said Bob Bomhower, a Reed Hill Road resident who spoke from his porch on Saturday morning as he waited for his wife to return from showering at a neighbor’s house — so he could go take one.
Bomhower was among the unlucky few who didn’t have a running generator. But it wasn’t from lack of trying, he said; two broken generators were resting in his garage.
“Plainfield and parts of Cornish suffered some of the worst damage in this storm,” Seth Wheeler of New Hampshire Electric Cooperative said in an email Saturday. “The main line into Plainfield was so devastated that it took five tree crews cutting for two days just so we could assess the damage there.”
Eversource and Liberty Utilities also reported outages, but New Hampshire Electric Cooperative appeared to have had it the worst, given that all of its 255 customers in Plainfield were without power on Saturday morning.
It was the longest Bomhower could remember going without power — at least since the “Great Ice Storm” of 1998 — and he expressed wariness when told that utility crews were headed his way soon.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.
Town officials last week also appeared restless after several days of outages affecting hundreds of residents.
“Please help us understand the plan that will get us back to 100 percent energized in the shortest amount of time,” Town Administrator Steve Halleran said in an email to New Hampshire Electric Cooperative.
Immediately after the storm, outages struck 46,000 of the utility’s customers throughout the state, the company said in a news release on Monday. As of Saturday morning, roughly half of its 282 customers in neighboring Cornish were still without power, according to the company’s online outage map.
“We have been fortunate that the weather has remained warm, but our residents are getting anxious and frustrated,” Halleran said in his email. “An army of line trucks coming into town starting to replace poles, hang wire and transformers would go a long way to getting through the remaining down time.”
Co-op representatives responded later on Friday, telling Halleran that they were sending out crews. On Saturday, Wheeler said the utility expected to restore electricity to half of its Plainfield customers the same night, with the rest following tonight.
And indeed, come Saturday morning, bucket trucks were out in rural Plainfield, moving from pole to pole on Center of Town Road and hoisting downed lines.
Gesturing along the road as it climbed a hill, a utility worker explained that the crew would be restoring power in that direction throughout the day — headed toward residents such as Ann Grobe.
Speaking in her kitchen that morning, Grobe said she had made a $5 bet with her son that power wouldn’t be back by 5 p.m., but didn’t seem too upset to hear she might lose.
A recent accident has forced Grobe to use a wheelchair and limited her ability to put weight on her bod y, making it more difficult to feed her woodstove and get around the house.
“I’m not in the best of moods,” she said, adding a smile nonetheless.
Halleran, the town administrator, said he was pleased to hear that crews were out, explaining that he had secured a promise from the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative the day before to send 12 trucks, which the power company later upped to 16.
“We’re on our way to restoration,” he said in a telephone interview Saturday afternoon.
Halleran himself is one of the customers lacking electricity. He lives on Stage Road near a pole that broke during the storm, and said he expects his house will be among the last to be illuminated.
He added, however, that his primary concern was restoring coverage for the other 254 homes affected.
“We’re rooting for everyone else right now,” Halleran said.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.