A few days after Hurricane Irene took a swing at the east coast I looked at the outage maps for some of the electric utilities there. I had heard reports of widespread power outages from news channels back east, but I'd also heard from friends that Irene just wasn't as bad as they had expected (they were in PA, which you'll see in a moment wasn't hit as hard as other areas). These following outage maps show the huge impact the storm had on electric utilities. The screenshots were taken on August 30th; about 2 days after Irene hit MD, NJ, PA, NY, etc.
Here's Hurricane Irene's path:
Ok! Let's start in the southern part of the Northeast...
Delmarva Power (DELaware MARyland VirginiA, for those unfamiliar) had just under 2500 customers without power, as of 2 days after the storm.
Atlantic City Electric, which covers a large portion of southern New Jersey, had over 4000 customers without power.
PSE&G had 40,000+ customers without power
(note: estimated using low end of the key scale).
Jersey Central Power & Light had over 60,000+ customers without power
(note: estimated using low end of the key scale).
Specifically, Monmouth County alone had over 57,000 people without power.
Let's head inland to check out the situation in Pennsylvania.
Met-Ed and PPL both look pretty decent, at least compared to NJ.
Highlighting the hardest hit part of PPL's territory
ConEdison had 33,000+ customers without power.
Here is a roll-over breakdown of where the most affected customers live:
Long Island Power Authority was hit pretty hard as well.
Connecticut Light & Power... This map really shows how hard CT was hit by the storm. There were a few areas that had 100% of customers without power.
National Grid
Central Maine Power's website is a bit different. Rather than having an interactive, fairly real-time map of outages, they had a series of images showing outages from 8/28 through 8/30 (when I downloaded information). I strung their images together in an animation so you can see the change over time, and when the most people were without power. I apologize for the jumpiness of the image... their maps were all different, and for a quick blog entry I wasn't about to spend hours adjusting each image. Sorry!
You may need to click through to see the animated image.
If you're still with me, I hope you enjoyed the outage maps! It was fun to see not only the heavily impacted areas, but also to check out the different types of outage maps electric utilities use on their websites.
