It was windy across the state on Monday, with tree limbs knocking out power to thousands of residents. It was so gusty that the Mount Washington Observatory, where high wind is the norm, warned people to stay low.
“Dangerous conditions will be present above treeline as one of the most powerful wind storms of this decade hits the White Mountains,” it cautioned in a statement released about 9 a.m. Monday. “Today’s higher summits forecast includes gusts up to 165 miles per hour, and winds have already reached 144 mph.”
The state’s largest utility, Eversource, restored scattered outages to about 15,000 of its customers, which is about 3 percent of its base, since Sunday.
At one location in Deerfield, crews worked to remove a downed tree on South Road, not far from the town’s fairgrounds. Power was out for about 45 minutes as the tree was removed and repairs made, but it could have been a lot worse, an Eversource spokeswoman said.
The old uncovered wires in that section had recently been replaced with insulated wires, which hold up better to falling branches.
“With the upgraded wires and recent installation of smart switch technology that isolated the outage, power continued to flow to our customers and we were able to make repairs proactively,” spokeswoman Kaitlyn Woods said in a statement.
As a result, about 277 customers were without power during the repair.
“Without the recent upgrades, this tree would have impacted 2,444 of our customers,” Woods said.
Early in the day, the National Weather Service issued a strong wind warning for southern Vermont, southern New Hampshire and parts of Maine until Monday evening. It said wind gusts of 60 miles per hour were most likely in southern New Hampshire and southwest Maine, with sustained winds of 40 mph elsewhere.
Similarly, Unitil opened its emergency operations center Monday morning in anticipation of power outages.