PLAISTOW — Ed Chernosky lost his electricity in the ice storm and has spent the last week in the dark.
He's tired of seeing lights blazing on Route 125, where power has been on since Saturday, while he and his wife heat water on a coal stove and try to keep the pipes from freezing.
Around 4 a.m. yesterday, fed up with another report that 80 percent of Plaistow households had power back, he decided to go out and see for himself.
Chernosky drove up and down about 70 streets and counted more than 650 houses without electricity. He didn't bother counting apartments. Then he called Unitil and told customer service he seriously doubted the company's estimate that only 50 Plaistow customers still were waiting to see the lights come on. He'd just traveled 50 entire streets where no one had electricity.
Chernosky was correct — more than 50 customers are in the dark, according to George Gantz, Unitil senior vice president.
"We haven't been posting the right number of customers out in Plaistow," Gantz said. "We know that. The problem is, if we say we've got to fix that number, I have to go to somebody in the emergency operations center. And they've got to take somebody off a critical task, in terms of restoring power, to fix the data."
Unitil decided to keep everybody focused on restoring power and not stop to fix mistakes, Gantz said. But the company realizes these kinds of slip-ups aggravate people.
"We're not trying to tell people what they want to hear," he said.
The errors happen because the outage numbers are based on estimates, he said.
Unitil was off by hundreds of households, Plaistow Town Manager Sean Fitzgerald said yesterday. Town officials have known the utility company's numbers were not reliable and have been making their own estimates since Sunday. As of yesterday afternoon, about 350 households were still out, he said.
Fitzgerald stood by his official estimate Wednesday that power had been restored to 75 percent to 80 percent of customers, but said the real point is hundreds of people are still struggling in the dark. They need to brace themselves for the possibility it will be a few more days before the situation is back to normal. With another snowstorm barreling in today, Fitzgerald said, safety is top priority.
"If they don't have heat, they should go to stay with family or go to the Sanborn Regional High School shelter in Kingston," he said.
The shelter is pet-friendly, and offers food and showers. Residents who need emergency transportation can call the police at 382-1200, he said.
The error in the Plaistow estimate was by no means unique.
Atkinson town officials also doubted Unitil's estimates earlier this week that 58 percent of the households were back Monday.
"We're nowhere near even 50 percent," selectmen's Chairman Paul Sullivan said previously.
Unitil is not the only company whose outage estimates have raised town officials' eyebrows.
Earlier this week, Public Service of New Hampshire estimated Londonderry would have power restored by last night.
"We're seeing a disconnect there as well," Londonderry Town Administrator Dave Caron said. "The power company's estimates have been overly optimistic."
Town officials have been making their own estimates. Based on the mess of wires still down in the streets, Caron said it looks like it will be days more before everyone has power.
Meanwhile, PSNH has assigned six crews to the town.
"Obviously, that's not enough," Caron said. "No doubt, PSNH is out there working hard, but we've not seen a lot of progress in a lot of areas. We need more resources for folks who have been living under these conditions for a week now."
Allison McLean, PSNH spokeswoman, said statewide, PSNH has 729 crews on the job. The number is unprecedented, and they're working around the clock, she said.
McLean and Gantz said the utility companies have given their best estimates of the outages and the repair time, but the numbers are only estimates. If people haven't reported an outage, it's possible they haven't been counted, McLean said.
Also, the amount of damage from the ice storm has made it hard to predict the time repairs will actually take, Gantz said. Some jobs that normally would take a couple of hours have taken 12 hours.
"Some estimates are right and some are going to be wrong," Gantz said. "When you have estimates that are wrong, it's very distressing for people in a situation like this."
Jim Van Dongen, spokesman for the state emergency management bureau, said electric companies track outages by customer "tickets," and the tickets don't follow town lines. That makes it hard to say exactly how many people in Plaistow, for example, are in the dark.
"I don't think they're way off," he said. "It's very difficult to come up with absolutely firm numbers. But the trend is down. It's obvious it's down."
Gantz predicted 95 percent of Unitil customers will have power back by tonight.
"We are seeing the end of the road," he said.
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