For most residents of Nantucket, Thursday came as a beautifully sunny and warm day -- perfect weather for dozens of power crews pushing to get power back to the last few hundred homes and businesses.
They are, as a rule, the hardest -- like the homes on North Beach Street where crew leader Jon Hall of National Grid and his team were pushing late Thursday morning to get back on line.
Fierce winds and flooding tilted or toppled at least four utility poles on the street -- poles Verizon Communications owns and National Grid has to wait for Verizon to fix before it can address electric service.
Verizon said later the issue was National Grid needing to guarantee all power is fully shut off before their crews can work on repairing or replacing the damaged poles.
Grid workers restored electric lines as far as they safely could before reaching the area of the fallen poles. Hall let us watch at a safe distance as he pulled off the arduous feat of using a 30-foot pole to pluck a blown fuse off a transformer, then after fixing it, reattaching it and pushing it in until the distinctive "zzzz" sound of electricity flowing again is heard.
"Hopefully," Hall said, "we're getting close to the end."
