CL&P CREWS ARE "OVERWHELMED" BY DAMAGE TO SOUTHEASTERN CT ELECTRICAL GRID FOLLOWING HURRICANE IRENE

From The New London Day 

                                        Power crews work to restore electricity in Niantic, CT. 

On the color-coded power outage map on Connecticut Light & Power's website, southeastern Connecticut Tuesday night was mostly purple and black, the colors representing areas where 61 percent to 100 percent of customers were without electricity.

As of Tuesday evening, North Stonington, Salem, Lisbon and Griswold were in the black, with almost 100 percent of CL&P customers in those towns still without power. Ledyard was at 89 percent, Montville at 80 percent, Preston at 80 percent and Lyme at 94 percent.

The "lucky" towns included East Lyme - a little more than half the town had no power - and New London, where just 24 percent lacked power.

But for many the problem was less about the outage itself and more about not knowing when power would be restored.

Regionwide, officials and residents bemoaned what they said was a lack of communication about the utility's plan of attack.

"We did have a liaison (from CL&P) that landed on us maybe a half-hour ago," Ledyard Mayor Fred Allyn Jr. said Tuesday morning, "but we haven't yet determined how that's going to help us."

Allyn and officials in other towns said they were waiting for CL&P crews to arrive and help their public works departments, which needed the utility to advise them on live wires.

"(It would help) if all they did was just drive around and either put out surveyor's tape or drive around with public works behind them and say, 'That one's good, that one isn't,'" Allyn said.

Salem First Selectman Kevin Lyden said, half-joking, that he didn't care how the help arrived. "Send out a guy in a pickup truck," he said. "If these wires aren't live, we'll cut the trees."

It seems the damge to the power system is so widespread it is far beyond what CL&P is used to.

    Pete Mercuri, center, a New London Public Works employee, watches as Bruce Tackling, top right, a senior heavy operator with New London Public Works, positions his bucket to cut limbs and make progress toward removing the tree from the roof of the home on Chapel Dr. in New London.

"They seem overwhelmed," Lyden said of CL&P. "From what I see of the size of the storm, the size of the damage, it was a very bad storm. I know it wasn't a hurricane, it was downgraded to a tropical storm right before it hit here, but it caused a lot of damage to wires."

In Lyme, CL&P crews that spent all day Monday clearing the roads for safety reasons are now moving on to the restoration phase, said Lee Watkins, Lyme's emergency management director.

First Selectman Ralph Eno was out with a CL&P foreman Tuesday afternoon to point out broken poles and downed wires that need to be fixed, Watkins said. The restoration crew, eight trucks in all, is made up of out-of-town workers from as near as Boston and as far away as Minnesota and the Carolinas. They were expected to arrive by Tuesday night.

While CL&P has called in out of state crews to help restore power it seems like this is happening later than it should.

In Ledyard, resident Kim Prescott said she was alarmed to see cars drive under wires with large trees hanging precariously on them on busy Route 117. In a neighborhood off Long Cove Road, she said, a neighbor put a handmade sign out warning people to beware of live wires after waiting too long for authorities to get there.

"For 800 trucks being out, it seems like you should at least see a few here and there," Prescott said.

Prescott said she's driven around her town and others the past few days and sees the same scene everywhere. She said she's worried about her father. He lives in Waterford and has a heart condition, she said, and has been worked up about the lack of information.

"I think that what everyone is really frustrated about," Prescott said, "is there's still a dangerous situation going into the third day, and it's not being taken care of. Hurricane Bob, it was the first day or so and then you saw the cleanup effort. But we're not seeing the cleanup efforts."

Its not the CL&P crews are not working hard, they are, rather the extent of the dame is far more than they can handle and reinforcements from other states are only now beginning to arrive.

 The crews coming in from Colorado were, as of Tuesday morning, reportedly in the Des Moines, Iowa, area, Courtney said.

Courtney said the priority now was to ensure that power is restored in a timely manner. "We're going to have time to break this down once the recovery is over," he said. "We're going to have plenty of time to get some postgame analysis."

The post game for CL&P is going to be very intresting indeed.

CT SHORELINE HIT HARD BY HURRICANE IRENE

From the Hartford Courant.

The day after Irene lashed Cosey Beach, when police had let homeowners back into the ravaged shorefront neighborhood, Andy Weinstein squatted in front of what used to be his summer home.

The bearded Weinstein, who owns Star Tire in West Haven and whose face is known to many people through his television commercials, was stunned.
Behind him, sea water licked the pilings that the house used to sit on. Like some of the other cottages and year-round homes up and down this densely populated beach community, his entire house had been wrenched from its supports and deposited 40 feet away by waves that smashed through the house and washed over the roof.

"See, part of the house must be missing," Weinstein said, peering into the tangle of debris. "This wasn't the front," he said, tapping a support beam. His house had been reduced to a heap of boards, stacked as if a bulldozer had pushed them into a pile. Sitting on top, incongruously, was his daughter Shayna's bunk bed.

"It was my 16^th birthday yesterday," Shayna said. She had been putting up a brave front for hours, but then the tears came. Her mother, Page, hugged her.
"A kick in the teeth for her," said Weinstein, of Woodbridge.

A few feet away, Laura Boyer salvaged a few pieces of siding from the collapsed home that had been her family's summer haven for 60 years.

From the New London Day.

The latest power outage update from Connecticut Light and Power continues to paint a bleak picture for southeastern Connecticut, which continues to see a majority of its towns at 80 percent or more without power.

As of 11:58 a.m. Tuesday, the towns of Griswold, Lisbon, North Stonington and Salem were still entirely without power; Ledyard was at 99 percent, Montville was at 96 percent and Preston was at 93 percent.

The growing frustration in those towns was not the lack of power, but the lack of information about when power would be restored.

"We did have a liaison (from CL&P) that landed on us maybe a half hour ago," Ledyard mayor Fred Allyn, Jr. said Tuesday morning, "but we haven't yet determined how that's going to help us."

"I'm equally frustrated by not knowing," said Salem First Selectman Kevin Lyden, who added that the town was monitoring its residents who use oxygen and who have other medical conditions to make sure their generators were still working.

"They seem overwhelmed," Lyden said of CL&P. "From what I see of the size of the storm, the size of the damage, it was a very bad storm. I know it wasn't a hurricane, it was downgraded to a Tropical Storm right before it hit here, but it caused a lot of damage to wires."

Lyden said CL&P is "not giving me any dates, not making any promises."

In Griswold. First Selectmen Phil Anthony said he has been calling for information on a plan of action since Sunday. Anthony said he was having a meeting with CL&P representatives at 11 a.m.; it wasn't yet clear what the outcome of that meeting was.

"We're looking forward to an actual plan of operation," Anthony said, "and that's what I've been insisting on since the day of the hurricane. We'll see."

Al Lara, a spokesman for CL&P, said eastern Connecticut is a priority for the company and that this part of the state was among the hardest hit.

"Southeastern Connecticut is a major priority because of the damage we've gotten and identified so early on in the restoration," he said. "Specifically the greater New London area, that's been a very high priority. It's just that there's so much damage in so many different areas, you aren't likely to spot crews in your specific neighborhood."

This report from the New London Day as well. 

On day three of the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and Lieutenant Gov. Nancy Wyman visited Old Saybrook to assess the damage the storm caused in the coastal town.

Power had been restored to dozens of homes overnight, but 68 percent of Old Saybrook residents are still in the dark this afternoon.

At the Emergency Management Center in the basement of Town Hall this morning, where town officials have gathered since Sunday to respond to the storm, Courtney applauded the town's actions.

"It's impressive," Courtney said. "It really is."

The center is outfitted with the latest emergency-response technology. It provides representatives from all aspects of public and emergency service – fire, police, ambulance, public works, social services – with individual computers and serves as a central hub for town officials to figure out the best way to respond to emergencies, said Michael Gardner, deputy director of emergency management and a sergeant with the local police department.

Courtney and Wyman, who earlier this morning dropped by Madison and Clinton to survey the damage there, next went to Old Saybrook High School, where the police department's mobile command center was set up to provide wired and wireless Internet access and charging stations for laptops and cell phones.

Emergency Management Director and Old Saybrook police Chief Michael A. Spera said the town outfitted a standard truck into the mobile police center with minimal cost to the town for something that, bought new, would have cost some $500,000.

The town is also leasing a trailer with eight shower stalls to give residents without water an opportunity to take hot showers at the school. About 100 people showed up to take showers at the high school last night, the first night the trailer was made available to the public, Spera said.

Gas stations in town have been flooded with customers, leading to a "gas crisis" Monday that may have led to some price gouging, Spera said. One station was selling gas at $4.55 a gallon, he said.

 Currently at the Bank of Kev Estate in CT power and phones are out. There is some minor damage to my house but there are numerous large trees that have downed power lines all over my neighborhood. Those trees have yet to be removed and power cant be restored until they are removed. So far there are is no timetable on when those trees will be removed.

It looks like power could be out for days.


Having talked with several people in Southeastern CT they tell me that the damage seems far more widespread than 1985 Hurricane Gloria. What is worse is that with power out everyone wants to know what is going on since there has been very little way to get news updates. Most of my phone conversations have been me updating people what the local news outlets are saying.

UNIVERSIAL CANCELS ANOTHER ANNOUNCED BIG BUDGET FILM

From TheWrap.com

Universal has scrapped plans to make "Ouija," a movie based on Hasbro's fortune-telling game board.

McG was set to direct the movie. Michael Bay, among others, was to produce.
By dropping the project -- part of a deal Universal made with Hasbro in 2008 -- the studio will have to pay the toymaker a $5 million fee, an individual familiar with the project told TheWrap.

The studio cited budget concerns. An individual close to the studio said that the budget -- described as "tentpole" -- is right for the film, but the film isn't right for Universal.

It's the second major Hasbro movie Universal has backed out of. Last year it ditched plans for a screen remake of the popular board game "Clue," a spokesperson for Universal told TheWrap.

This ties right into...

"The Dark Tower" has gone dark.

Universal's ambitious adaptation of Stephen King's fantasy series has been canceled, TheWrap has confirmed. 

The first film was slated to begin production this summer, but shooting was delayed last spring with the studio announcing that it needed to make the project more cost-effective.

In Hollywood projects are announced and canceled all the time. There can be many reasons for cancellations but they do happen to things that are announced. What often happens when these projects are canceled is that people move on to the next thing.

But you should file this information away for future reference. Just sayin.

THE LATEST ON THE ARROYO

Via Big Hollywood our good friends at Declaration Entertainment have posted yet another video "The Arroyo".

NEVER SAY NO TO A PANDA

LOVE THIS PIG

Money should be BIG and FAT! This pig rocks!

HOW HOLLYWOOD OVERHYPES ITS FILMS

From Entertainment Weekly.

both official stage-managed Comic-Con leaks and unofficial long-lens TMZ leaks — is beginning to radically change the way a generation of moviegoers talk about movies. We have become obsessed with pre-release minutiae — casting announcements, plot points, set design. All of this has, I think, taken the focus off the most important thing: The freaking movie.

This is why the blockbuster season of 2011 has felt so particularly uninspired. It’s not that the movies are necessarily worse than they were 10 years ago (although nothing released 10 years ago was even half as bad as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides). It’s just that very few of the movies were even half as interesting as the chatter that led up to their release. Take, for example, The Hangover Part 2, a film which dominated the news cycle one year ago — remember the Mel Gibson flare-up? Now, the movie was a massive success at the box office. But the only conversation we ever really had about Hangover 2 — and we all had this conversation many, many times — was: “Wow, they really just remade the first one.”

It might sound funny to say this, but the film with the longest cultural tail of summer 2011 didn’t even technically come out in the summer. I’m talking about Fast Five. Yes, it’s a silly film — but for a few weeks in May, it was also the silly film that everyone was talking about it. Part of that can be credited to the film’s surprisingly pitch-perfect over-the-top tone — best exemplified by the sequence when Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson wrestle each other through multiple walls like a pair of shaved grizzly bears. But I would argue a different theory: People were genuinely surprised by Fast Five. It was not a film that had been sold for a year in advance. The film was not at Comic-Con. The trailer did not debut one year in advance. There were no TMZ photos of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson hanging out off-camera rubbing oil on their biceps, even though God knows that would have torn up the internet.

It is a very interesting article and worth the read. 

AIRLINE DELAYS ON THE RISE

From the AP

More than a dozen planes sat on the tarmac for more than three hours in June, the government said Tuesday. It's the second month in a row that the number of three-hour delays reached double digits since a government rule went into effect over a year ago aiming to limit them.

The Department of Transportation said 14 planes were stuck on the tarmac for over three hours in June. There were 16 such delays in May. There were only 20 in the full year before that. The rule threatening millions of dollars in fines for delays of three hours or more was implemented on April 29 of last year.

DOT hasn't fined an airline for violating the rule, because it says that none of the delays was serious enough to justify the big penalties. Nearly all of them were caused by bad weather.

[snip]

June is one of the busiest travel months of the year and it's also peak thunderstorm season.

You do have to wonder the motivation behind this article sine it clearly states that it was the weather that caused these delays.  Yes I've been stuck on planes for a couple of hours on the ground and its not fun but all of the time those delays were caused by weather.

DOW JONES LOSES 634 POINTS

From CNBC

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 634.76 points, or 5.55 percent, to finish at 10,809.85, well below the psychologically-significant 11,000 mark. The move marks the blue-chip index's biggest point and percent drop since Dec. 1, 2008.

BofA [BAC  6.51    -1.66  (-20.32%)   ] and Alcoa [AA  11.33    -1.46  (-11.42%)   ] were the top laggards on the index.

The S&P 500 plummeted 79.92 points, or 6.66 percent, to close at 1,119.46, its lowest close since Sept. 10, 2010. 

Nasdaq sank 174.72 points, or 6.90 percent, to end at 2,357.69, its lowest close since October 4, 2010.

August is already on track to be the worst month for the S&P and Nasdaq since Oct. 2008.

The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, spiked above 40 to touch its highest level since Mar. 2009. 

No one knows what tomorrow will bring.

                        

THE GIANT CASINO

From the film "Rouge Trader".

DOW CRASHES 500 POINTS

DREAMWORKS ANIMATION LOOKING FOR A NEW DISTIRBUTOR

From TheWrap.com

DreamWorks Animation is looking for a new home.

The studio’s board of director has rejected a proposal from Paramount to extend its distribution pact for another year, an individual with knowledge of the negotiations told TheWrap. 

DreamWorks' current deal with Paramount expires in 2012. 

Finding a new landing ground for Jeffrey Katzenberg's animation house, however, could be difficult. Most of the studios have animation divisions.
Fox has ramped up its animated output, scoring hits with films such as "Ice Age," and Universal launched its own division, Illumination, headed up by Chris Meledandri in 2007. Sony also has an animation division. 
Warner Bros. is reportedly not interested in distributing DreamWorks Animation's films.

It will be quite interesting to see where Dreamworks Animation finds for a distributor for its films.