Spring ice storm knocks out power to thousands

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

As temperatures rise and shards of ice fall from the trees they have bent or broken, a drizzle of rain continues to fall while power crews work to restore electricity to thousands of customers in our area.

The freezing rainstorm, which began on Saturday morning, deposited ice on tree branches and power lines through the day and into the evening throughout southern and central Vermont. And then the power outages began mounting up.

By late morning on Sunday, Green Mountain Power announced that it was “making significant progress” having restored power to “more than 14,000 customers since early Saturday morning,” with more than 11,000 still to go at that point with more than 1,000 customers without power in Winhall alone.

According to GMP, the company had brought in “external” field crews that more than doubled its full field team.

“We track multiple forecasts for days in advance of a weather event like this so we can respond as quickly and safely as possible for customers,” said Mike Burke, GMP’s vice president of Operations. “This is a very unusual storm for this time of year. Crews are reporting thick ice and tough travel.”

At 6 a.m. Monday, there were still 5,848 customers waiting to be reconnected to the grid with Peru accounting for 402 of those. Winhall and Windham has 382 and 380 customers out respectively. It appears that the ice has slowed progress as the total without power was remained over 5,600 at noon today. Currently, outage totals for the area stand at:

• Windham ………. 416
• Peru ……………… 408
• Winhall …………. 370
• Andover ………… 266
• Mount Holly …… 250
• Ludlow ………….. 178
• Weston .………….165
• Cavendish ……… 134
• Chester …………..  62
• Londonderry …… 56

Early Monday afternoon, GMP spokesperson Kristin Kelly told The Telegraph that “This is an unusual storm for this time of year – crews report ice nearly an inch thick as they work in central and southern Vermont.” She said that crews have continued to make progress although “new damage is happening from ice unloading as temperatures warm up.”

Nevertheless, according to Kelly, crews had restored power to more than 36,000 customers  at that point.

As the storm winds down, GMP is reminding customers to stay far away from any downed lines or trees. Update, by the end of the afternoon, 2,863 customers remained without power, the vast majority in our area.