The storm enters day 3; many without power

We've been clobbered, friends.  Ripton entered the third day of this storm, with power remaining out for some of us still after two days of snow, sleet, and ice.  Twenty Ripton households are offline, caused by five separate outages, as of this writing, according to Green Mountain Power.  211 homes are out in Lincoln, which is the source of some Ripton electricity.  Down the hill, 695 Middlebury houses are off.

For those who do have power, they might be offline, as Fairpoint suffered its own outage today.

Meanwhile, Green Mountain Power teams have been on the job continuously, but fresh outages keep occurring.  That's because of overloaded trees, bent down by ice and snow, breaking a day or two after the initial onslaught.

Much of the state is suffering, with 22,746 homes still without power:

Estimates of how many Vermonter households were knocked out range from 50,000 to 70,000.

Here's an astonishing fact, pointing to just how severe this storm has been and remains:

“We do prepare for the worst, and then we found out we needed to get even more crews. We have more crews operating in the state of Vermont in this event than we did during Hurricane Irene,” [Mary Powell, the president and CEO of Green Mountain Power] said. (emphases added)

Stay safe and warm, friends and neighbors.  Watch out for downed power lines.  Drive carefully.