As of Wednesday morning, 160,000 Massachusetts residents remained without power, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, mostly on or near Cape Cod.
A map created by MEMA shows that in three Cape towns — Wellfleet, Eastham and Brewster — more than 75% of residents don’t have electricity 36 hours after the blizzard that dumped one to two feet of snow in most of the state ended.
That’s just over half of the nearly 300,000 state residents without power at the peak of the blizzard Monday.
At noon Tuesday, Gov. Maura Healey had lifteda travel ban in Bristol, Plymouth, Barnstable and Duke counties that were placed yesterday. But she said residents should drive cautiously and stay home if possible to allow crews to continue cleanup efforts after one to two feet of snow fell during the storm.
“While we are lifting the travel ban, the state of emergency remains in effect for some counties, and we urge people to continue using caution and stay home today if possible to allow crews to do their work,” said Healey.
Doug Foley, president of Electric Operations for Eversource, said Monday’s blizzard conditions made utilities job nearly impossible for disaster recovery crews to restore power safely, especially along the south shore and Cape Cod.
“The focus today is to continue on with any public service safety events with the communities, to understand exactly what we have,” Foley said during a news conference in Yarmouth Tuesday morning. “We [need) to know the extent of the catastrophic damage that we have down here in the Cape and the Plymouth area.”
Foley said Eversource, the largest of the utilities serving Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut, has 2,000 line crews and thousands of people working with tree crews from dispatch centers.
In Yarmouth, contractors will come in from as far as Detroit, Canada and Ohio to help cleanup efforts, and crews are coming from New Hampshire and Connecticut to help restore power.
“We have two helicopters, one in the Plymouth New Bedford area and one down here in the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard, so they’re going to do a rapid patrol of our right-of-ways, our transmission right-of-ways,” Foley said. “It’s the quickest way for us to do an assessment.”
'Cement-like snow’
Foley said one problem is the “cement-like snow” that’s caking onto equipment at the substation and needs to be cleaned-off with a pressure washer.
He said Eversource is working closely with the Steamship Authority to get additional resources over to Martha’s Vineyard, where there are some pre-staged crews.
In Plymouth, 21,000 customers are without power, or 59% of the town as of Tuesday afternoon. Plymouth Town Manager Derek Brindisi said emergency operations are working as quickly as possible to restore power with the help of the utilities.
“This has been a historic storm, and we really are asking for the residents to be patient with us,” Brindisi said. “We spent a lot of time trying to help a lot of folks that were rescued on the side of the road that really should not have been driving. So that took away from our plow operations.”
Brindisi said with Monday’s winds at blizzard conditions, the town had about 110 pieces of equipment out on the roads, but after working 30 hours straight many had to take a break and rest.
“We’re only at 50% strength, and we’re trying to cover the fourth-largest road network in Massachusetts. Plymouth is a big community,” he said.
Plymouth is 104 square miles and among the largest in the state, behind Boston, Worcester and Springfield.
The town has requested help from the state in the form of heavy snow removal equipment, such as front-end loaders, skid steers and Humvees.
“We have drifts that are four or five feet in height, and we only can move that with front-end loaders,” he said.
David Golden, chair of the Plymouth Board of Selectmen, attended a meeting at the Emergency Operations Center at the Cedarville Fire Station Tuesday morning to assess the post-storm situation.
He said many of the people without heat and electricity are unable to shovel themselves out.
“There are a lot of folks out there who are in need of help and we’re deploying as many resources as we can to get that help to them.”
The town has set up an emergency shelter at Plymouth North High School.
State of emergency remains
A state of emergency remains in effect for all counties except for Berkshire, Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin. And some towns still have local travel restrictions and parking bans, and there were multiple vehicles seen stuck and abandoned along some highways and entrance and exit ramps.
Healey activated up to 350 members of the Massachusetts National Guard to support storm recovery operations.
Brindisi and other officials have said that with snow accumulation of more than two feet, the storm exceeded the record of outages from the most recent prior blizzard in January 2022.
He is asking residents to help other neighbors and be patient in restoring power, calling it “ a protracted storm” event.
“This has been the most challenging storm that we’ve seen in the not-so-distant past,” he said.
“I talked to our fire chief and police chief, who’ve been both working for each one of those departments, respectively about 25 and 30 years, and they both said they’ve never seen a storm like this ... probably the most challenging storm in at least the last 20-plus years.”
Don Seiffert contributed to this article.
