A week after Hurricane Sandy pummeled Connecticut’s shoreline, a nor’easter that could bring wind gusts up to 70 mph and carries the potential for coastal flooding, is on its way.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said the emergency operations center to remain open.
“We’re concerned that this is more than a small storm and perhaps substantially less than a great storm,” Malloy said.
However, Sandy brought changes to the shoreline and predicting who is going to get flooding is even more difficult than it was just seven days ago, Malloy said Monday evening during a briefing outside his Capitol office.
Power has been restored to many of the 630,000 Connecticut customers that lost it last Monday evening.
United Illuminating, which services 17 towns near the shore, is reporting only 5,768 customers are without power Monday evening and Connecticut Light & Power, which services 149 cities and towns, still has about 16,685 customers without power.
The town with the highest number of outages Monday evening was Greenwich with 4,512 customers still in the dark or using generators.
Malloy said he’s happy the number of residents without power is down, but he would like to see power restored to the nearly 25,000 customers in the dark.
Because more than 10 percent of the customers for both utilities were without power for days there will be a full review of their performance done by the Public Utility Regulatory Authority.
“This storm has the potential of knocking people back out of power and that’s one of our great concerns,” Malloy said.
Meanwhile, Malloy encouraged residents to register with FEMA if their home or business was damaged. Only 3,800 residents have registered with FEMA for assistance.
“FEMA has already allocated more than $1 million to residents. I want to urge any individuals or businesses who have suffered losses or damages as a result of Storm Sandy to visit a center and work with the staff there to review the benefits they are entitled to,” Malloy said.
To make it easier mobile disaster centers opened in Milford, Guilford, and Stonington Monday. Centers were opened last week in Bridgeport, Greenwich, Groton, New Haven, and Old Saybrook.
