Gusts of wind approaching 50 mph left thousands of Concord area residents without power Thursday.
Unitil, which serves about 30,000 customers in the area, reported roughly 2,500 local outages about 1:30 p.m., mostly confined to Chichester and Epsom.
Spokesman Alec O’Meara said the winds began causing problems about 9:30 a.m. and hadn’t quit by the afternoon.
“We had those folks (in Chichester and Epsom) back on briefly, and it looks like they’re back off again,” O’Meara said. “So long as the wind continues to blow, we could see things continuing to happen out there.”
Beyond the wind, O’Meara said the recent heat wave has thawed out the ground and saturated it with water, creating an environment that has allowed trees to fall over.
“The softer earth is allowing whole trees to come over, complicating restoration efforts,” he said.
Eversource was also patching up wires Thursday afternoon, although outages were limited for its customers in Merrimack County.
The most heavily affected towns, according to the utility’s outage map online, were in the western part of the county. Henniker had 350 outages – or 15 percent of all customers – and Bradford had 190 outages, or 17 percent.
The Monadnock region was hit perhaps the hardest of any area of the state, according to the outage map. By 2 p.m., more than 70 percent of residents in Francestown, Lyndeborough and Temple were without power.
Each of the 2,835 Eversource customers in Rindge was without power at 2 p.m.
O’Meara said he’d received multiple reports of downed electrical wires and warned that travelers should assume downed wires are live.
“If you see wires down, you want to stay away,” he said. “Call customer service or 911.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)