One Glenview block played backdrop to a tale of haves and have-nots Monday, as residents on one side of the street rejoiced in the glow of restored electricity, while neighbors across the street still waited for power.
“You have no idea what you miss until it’s gone,” said Mary Morley, 55, who lives on the east side of Canterbury Lane and had power restored about 10 a.m. Monday. Now “you can plug your cell phone in. I was calling everyone.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, another mood persisted.
“This is a … mess here,” said Tom Sanger, 67, as he cleared broken tree branches from his back yard. “It’s frustrating when you see on TV that we’re down to 18,000 people without power out of 300,000. I feel like I’m the last soldier standing.”
Power was restored to the entire street by 5 p.m. Monday, but until then Sanger’s home was among a dwindling number still in the dark after storms ravaged the Chicago region Thursday.
ComEd officials said the last homes left without power were some of the most difficult to bring back online.
As of 9:30 p.m. Monday, 793 customers remained without power, including 783 in the north suburbs with the rest scattered through the city and south suburbs.
That compared with a 10 a.m. Monday total of 6,100 without power.
Immediately after the storm, ComEd prioritized outages. First to be restored were “critical” customers, such as hospitals, fire departments and police stations, said ComEd spokesman Jeff Burdick.
Then workers, like surgeons tending to main arteries before focusing on the smaller capillaries, focused on restoring power to as many homes as possible by targeting easy fixes that served the most people.
Then, with power restored to more than 629,520 customers, 940 crews from as far away as Texas worked block-by-block and home-by-home.
Those without power days later are primarily in “leafy neighborhoods,” where trees and flooding heavily damaged lines, poles and other equipment, Burdick said.
“In those areas there won’t just be a single point of contact that needs repair,” he said. “It often takes much longer. When you get to the end of a storm restoration situation, like we’re in now, it’s a challenge in these areas with a lot of tree damage to even get equipment in there.”
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The sources of the problem for residents on the west side of Canterbury Lane just north of Lake Avenue were tree branches that fell and damaged a power pole and a string of power lines running along the rear of properties.
Those lines transmit power between a feeder line along Lake Avenue, which serves as a main artery for thousands of homes.
The lines were fixed earlier in the day, but workers were waiting for machinery to set a new pole before switching power back on.
The machinery, in high demand in other neighborhoods, never came Monday, so crews eventually decided to tether the old pole to the ground with stakes and rope until it could be replaced, said Beau Henderson, foreman of the contractors working there.
Though the power was on by dinner time, it wasn’t soon enough for Sanger, who had to deal with not only a flooded basement, but also throwing away the last of the meat from his freezer.
“The thing that really irritates me is throwing away five steaks and a side of beef,” said Sanger. “That’s minimum $200, probably closer to $500.”
Next door to Sanger, Jeffrey Harris was more upbeat as he cleared out his flooded basement.
“In my estimation, it was a godsend,” said Harris, who was excited about the excuse to throw away years of clutter that had accumulated in his basement.
By late morning the soggy items at the end of Harris’ driveway included several board games, a mattress, carpeting and his wife’s treadmill.
“This is awesome,” said a sweaty Harris, though he did lament the loss of an antique player piano.
As residents cleared out their basements and waited for the welcome flicker of lights, ComEd officials spoke at a news conference in Glenview to assure city and state officials that crews were working as quickly as possible to restore power, saying efforts should be complete by Tuesday night.
Still, officials complained that the last of the powerless residents were ill-informed and growing impatient.
As workers crisscrossed her back yard repairing power lines and examining the damaged electric pole, Diane Hertzberg occasionally stepped onto her front porch on Canterbury Lane to read and have a cigarette to pass the time.
At 4:52 p.m., lights around the house turned on, the microwave beeped and Hertzberg said she immediately switched on the air conditioner and ran to every room closing windows.
“I’m just elated,” she said. “I just wanted to give every one of those [workers] a big hug.”
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