County annual report · FIPS 25009
2017 Essex County, MA Power Outage Report
In 2017, customers in Essex County, MA went without power for an average of 20.0 hours, a total of 4.3M customer-hours (Massachusetts average 4.7 hours). That ranks 2nd worst of 14 Massachusetts counties and 276th of 2,786 nationally.
Compared with MA, the US and 2016
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Massachusetts customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Essex County, 2017
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 30, 2017 00:45 | November 4, 2017 08:00 | 5d 7h | 78,644 | 3.3M |
| 2 | March 14, 2017 14:30 | March 17, 2017 04:00 | 2d 13h | 43,083 | 583K |
| 3 | February 12, 2017 22:30 | February 13, 2017 10:00 | 11h 30m | 11,366 | 22K |
| 4 | May 6, 2017 13:00 | May 6, 2017 22:45 | 9h 45m | 6,563 | 2,279 |
| 5 | September 3, 2017 10:45 | September 4, 2017 03:15 | 16h 30m | 6,127 | 8,634 |
| 6 | January 23, 2017 20:30 | January 25, 2017 18:30 | 1d 22h | 6,065 | 21K |
| 7 | July 2, 2017 09:00 | July 2, 2017 15:45 | 6h 45m | 5,793 | 11K |
| 8 | February 22, 2017 01:00 | February 22, 2017 17:30 | 16h 30m | 5,310 | 4,350 |
| 9 | December 23, 2017 06:30 | December 24, 2017 21:15 | 1d 14h | 4,624 | 30K |
| 10 | July 24, 2017 15:45 | July 25, 2017 07:30 | 15h 45m | 4,499 | 7,882 |
Outage episodes by size in 2017: 203 reached 100+ customers, 68 reached 1,000+ customers, 3 reached 10,000+ customers.
Utility reliability filed with the EIA
SAIDI (average outage time per customer) and SAIFI (average interruptions per customer) that utilities serving Essex County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2017, or their most recent earlier filing. Utility-wide figures, not county-specific.
| Utility | EIA year | SAIDI | SAIFI | SAIDI excl. major events | SAIFI excl. major events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Electric Co | 2014 | 2.4 hrs | 1.12 | 1.6 hrs | 0.96 |
| Town of Reading - (MA) | 2017 | 21 min | 0.28 | 14 min | - |
| City of Marblehead - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| City of Peabody - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Danvers | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Georgetown - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Groveland - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Ipswich - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Merrimac - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Middleton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Rowley - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about n/a of Massachusetts's customers in 2017; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 216,314 customers (ORNL modeled county customer count), including major storm days. It is comparable across counties but is not the SAIDI a utility files.
- An outage event is a continuous stretch with customers out; counts at 100, 1,000 and 10,000+ use its peak.
- Years loaded: 2015–2025. Essex County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Essex County, MA annual power outage report, 2017, data as of Oct 3, 2026 02:41 UTC, sources: DOE EAGLE-I (https://eagle-i.doe.gov/); EAGLE-I modeled customer counts (MCC) (https://figshare.com/); EIA Form 861 (utility reliability) (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/). https://massoutage.com/reports/2017/massachusetts/essex-county