All Melrose Power Outages Estimated To Be Restored By Midnight

Any lingering Melrose households that still don't have power in the wake of Irene should have their power restored by midnight tonight, National Grid announced on Tuesday afternoon.

In the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, 1,008 Melrose customers lost power at some point, according to an update provided by National Grid—approximately 8.4 percent of the 11,967 customers in the city.

As of Tuesday at 3 p.m., National Grid said that 50 remaining Melrose customers still didn't have power. (PDF of National Grid update attached to this article.) A map of outages is available on National Grid's website.

Customers who have an emergency or someone on life-supporting equipment should call National Grid at 1-800-465-1212.

Melrose and the rest of the northeast Massachusetts fared better than most of the cities and towns that lost power due to Irene. Within National Grid's service area, some of the communities with the most widespread outages immediately after the storm were Attleboro (98 percent of the city), Brockton (74 percent) and Stoughton (85 percent).

Some communities still have the majority of their households without power and won't have completely restored power until Sunday.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Richard K. Sullivan Jr., state secretary of energy and environmental affairs, said that at 9 p.m. on Sunday, the four utility companies reported a total of 643,734 outages, with 386,962 in National Grid's service area.

"While the outage numbers were cut in half overnight and the utilities are making progress, we are mindful of the ice storm of 2008, which left many without power for two weeks, and we expect that utility companies will heed lessons learned from that incident to protect their ratepayers from similar hardship," Sullivan said in the statement.

As of 5 p.m. on Tuesday, there were 204,617 remaining power outages according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency—143,337 for National Grid, and 61,280 for NStar.

Residents told Melrose Patch on Monday that the power was cut in the Wyoming Hill area, including on Boston Rock Road and Mt. Vernon Street—where arcing wires briefly caused a utility pole fire Sunday night.

Other areas that faced power outages included Lovell Road, where multiple limbs and trees fell on wires, and Penney Hill Road, where trees took down a utility pole and a transformer leaked out on to the roadway.