Parts of Connecticut under a tropical storm warning as Tropical Storm Elsa moves quickly toward New England. Up to 40,000 may lose power.

Tropical Storm Elsa is expected to strike early Friday morning and move through Connecticut quickly, bringing power outages, drenching rain and powerful winds as it sweeps through southern New England.

The National Weather Services issued a tropical storm warning stretching from Bridgeport to the east along the Connecticut shore and inland to New London County and Norwich.

“We are going to get hit by a pretty hard storm,’' Gov. Ned Lamont said during a press briefing at the state’s Emergency Operations Center Thursday evening. “Elsa should be much less severe both in terms of wind and in terms of flood damage,” Lamont said, referring to Tropical Storm Isaias last year.

“We had better be a lot better prepared than last time,” Lamont said. “I thought last time around was a communications failure. I think a lot of people were flying blind. [Utility companies] need more capacity in their emergency response centers, in particular, Eversource.”

The storm is expected to create widespread outages, with up to 40,000 customers experiencing a loss of power, according to an estimate prepared by UConn’s Eversource Energy Center. Eversource says it is prepared to handle as many as nearly 400,000 outages, if necessary.

Gary Lessor, chief meteorologist at Western Connecticut State University, said the storm will track along southeastern Long Island to southeastern New England. He said much of the storm will be over by noon, with up to 3 inches of rain falling and “peak wind gusts of 25 to 35 mph for most of the state, but up to 40 [mph] near the shore and up to 45 mph in southeastern coastal Connecticut.”

A flash flood warning has also been issued for the entire state.

How much power will be out?

Preparing for the worst, Eversource has over 250 tree crews and around 700 restoration crews that include internal workers and contractors, and about 500 powerline crews on standby for fallen trees, outages and damage the storm may cause, Eversource President of Regional Operations, Craig Hallstrom, said.

As many as 40,000 customers could lose power. Throughout the last few days of back-to-back storms across the state, some evenings, the energy company has seen upwards of 21,000 residents without power.

“Our folks have been working around the clock and dealing with [the severe thunderstorms],” Hallstrom said. “It’s kind of a double threat, we got a tropical storm and we’re also dealing with lightning storms. You know some of the actions we do as we prepare for the storm is communicate.”

By Friday morning, Eversource will activate its command center and declare a “level four event,” which means they will be ready if necessary for over 10,000 damage locations impacting 380,000 customers, Hallstrom said.

Eversource will also have a staff member available for each first selectman or mayor across the state so they have someone to reach out to with any problems.

What area is going to be hit the worst?

The southeastern part of the state will be hit the hardest and will likely see wind gusts as high as 40-50 mph, Western’s Lessor said.

The eastern two-thirds of Connecticut likely will see 1-3 inches of rain, while the western third will see less, from .5-1.5 inches, Lessor added.

A flash flood watch is in effect from late Thursday through Friday afternoon, the National Weather Service said Thursday morning.

Blumenthal to Eversource: ‘be prepared’

Jumping on the anxiety over Elsa’s arrival, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal stood in front of Eversource Energy’s Hartford office Thursday morning and delivered a strong warning to the utility company: “You better be prepared. A repeat of the last tropical storm, Isaias, is simply intolerable.”

“There’s no way the people of Connecticut are going to tolerate another million outages for days on end, without proper communication and preparation,’' Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal praised Connecticut regulators for assessing a $30 million penalty against Eversource for its failures during Isaias. “But…penalties are after the fact,’' he said. “What’s needed before the storm is preparation.”

Blumenthal said Eversource ought focus on “putting people above profits” and said if the investor-owned corporation cannot do that, “maybe it ought to be owned by the public…that may be the consequence of another failure.”

In a statement issued as Blumenthal was speaking, Eversource said Blumenthal’s “rabble rousing” comments make customers fearful and aren’t helpful as the power company races to prepare for the arrival of Elsa.

“We are intensely focused on preparing our response to Tropical Storm Elsa and we can assure our customers that we are ready. We’ve stayed on top of the track of the storm all week,’' Eversource said. “We’ve brought in hundreds of additional line crews to assist with restoration starting last Sunday. We are pre-positioning equipment and crews at our work centers around the state.’'

What is Eversource promising?

The state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority in April rebuked Eversource and United Illuminating for the utilities’ handling of Isaias, which hit the state last Aug. 4. Customers and elected officials were furious at the utilities, creating intense political pressure that led to state legislation and public hearings and investigations by lawmakers and Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA).

After hundreds of residents were left without power for days last year, PURA has required that utilities must “provide safe and reliable service, and they are well compensated to do so,” PURA Chairman Marissa Paslick Gillett said.

“Ahead of an emergency event, we can mandate changes to the way they plan for and respond to storms, as we have done so here through our April 28 decision, and after a storm we can investigate their compliance with all applicable laws,” she said. “But during a storm, it is the utilities who must execute on their core duty to provide safe and reliable service.”

Hallstrom said that the Eversource crews had several meetings a day leading up to preparing for Friday morning.

Facing scrutiny from the way the energy company handled matters after Tropical Storm Isaias, Hallstrom also said that the first priority is better and faster communication with customers.

“We obviously took a very critical look at ourselves and our performance, and again, in my opinion, we did a lot of good things during these studies,” Hallstrom said. “The things that we really have tried to work on to be better, is how do we get information up and out of the field, out of our restoration teams...[and] in a kind of format that we can then get it out to regular communities and customers.”

Hallstrom also added that Eversource has hired crews " a lot sooner than we would have under our old plan.”

In the press conference with Lamont, Gillett added that preparation isn’t enough, but that Eversource also needs to make sure that funds are distributed into things like vegetation management.

“There’s lots of things that should’ve been done [last year] and can be done leading up to storms to make the grid more resilient and reliable,” Gillett said.

Courant staff writer Christine Dempsey contributed to this story.

Daniela Altimari may be reached at [email protected]. Jessika Harkay may be reached at [email protected].

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