Seven months into a high-risk pregnancy with gestational diabetes, Emily Penza found herself without electricity for five days last summer in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaias. Her blood pressure rose and her blood sugar “went crazy” as her carefully planned meals were disrupted by a refrigerator full of food gone bad.

Now parents to a healthy 9-month-old baby girl named Abigail, Penza and her husband, Ray, who live in Colchester, decided they could never go through an outage like that again. And in the end, they realized they couldn’t rely on Eversource to ensure they never did.

“Given that we would have an infant heading into the winter, and hope to have more children in the future, we decided to invest in a generator,” Penza said this week, approaching the one-year anniversary of the storm that left 700,000 Eversource customers in Connecticut without power.

“I had initially been loath to do so, because I feel that I should be able to rely on my electricity provider, but I can't imagine going through that with babies or young children,” Penza said of their generator purchase. “It was a huge unplanned expense, but gives me a little of my peace of mind back.”

She said the worst part of the storm was having no idea when power would be restored and having little communication from Eversource about what was being done to help.

“I've always been leery of storms, but you could ask my husband — since Isaias, I have been jumpy at the first sign of real wind,” the new mom said. “If the trees are moving, my foot is tapping or my fists are clenched, and I get quiet.”

And she’s not alone. Nearby in Colchester, the Craig family feels the same.

The Craig family was in the middle of a two-week quarantine ahead of a surgery for their daughter Kyla’s genetic disorder when their power went out during Isaias. It didn’t come back on for 10 days.

“We’ve lived here for 20 years and we maybe lost power for a day once or twice, but never lost power to a point where it was 10 days," Autumn Craig, mother of Kyla, said. "That was crazy and I never want to go through that again.”

So, the family has taken some very expensive steps to ensure that they don’t.

Nearly as soon as they got their power back, they ordered a generator online for a few thousand dollars. Shortly after, they spent $3,000 removing trees from the area near the closest power lines. Those trees, Craig said, shouldn’t have been the family's responsibility to remove but they didn’t want to wait, so they swallowed the expense.

In the past year, she said she thinks the company is "definitely communicating better that there's a storm coming and that there may be outages and when you're going to get restored" but still isn’t providing enough information about what the company will do to respond to "major issues."

State Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, said Eversource customers saw “a complete breakdown in communication” from their utility company last summer. Shortly after the storm, he called on the company to make major changes. Since then, he said he’s seen the company improve communication and work more directly with cities and towns to communicate about important issues like outages and blocked roads.

In a statement this week, Eversource said it has implemented a team of community liaisons who are able to provide information more quickly to all 149 communities the company serves. It also is rolling out a new online “municipal hub” that will help liaisons better communicate with municipalities to address priorities.

The hub’s outage map will allow local emergency officials to add new information about issues as they happen and see real-time updates regarding the status of their critical facilities and blocked roads.

Improving communication is “one area where I do think they’re working hard to make progress,” Needleman said.

But, he said, there’s much more work to be done.

Needleman said he’s been encouraging Eversource to reopen work centers that were closed a few years ago in order to strengthen communication and connection with cities and towns even more. He also thinks the company should grow its workforce, hiring more linemen.

He said he was happy to hear that the company recently graduated a new class of linemen, but said he thinks it will take years for the company to grow its workforce to what it should be in order to properly serve the region.

With better communication and staffing, Needleman said he thinks Eversource will be better able to tackle major storms without being underprepared, or even without being overprepared by bringing in costly crews from out of state.

“They have to walk a fine line and I think that they were on the wrong side of that fine line in the past,” he said.

State Sen. Cathy Osten D-Sprague, joined Needleman at a news conference in Essex last year while thousands remained without power — herself included — and also called for better communication from the company. She said it was unacceptable that so many residents were left not only without power, but without answers.

The state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, or PURA, issued violation notices to Eversource and United Illuminating after releasing final reports on its investigation of the utilities' storm responses. Connecticut regulators this year proposed a $30 million fine for Eversource and $2.1 million fine for United Illuminating for what they called failures in preparation and response to Isaias.

Osten said she’s seen improvements from Eversource. “During the last few storms, they've been relatively quick at resolving the outages, which I think is very much appreciated,” she said. When she has lost power this year, she said it’s only been for an hour or two.

Eversource, she said, also has done a lot of work to remove trees that could cause problems during storms. But she said she hopes to see a more comprehensive plan, and help from the state, in removing even more. She said there are likely several thousand more trees that should be removed in order to prevent massive storm damage.

The utility company said in a statement this week that it has a “robust year-round vegetation management program” that is a major component of its storm preparation. Last year, Eversource said, 77% of power outages in the state were caused by trees, so the company is being proactive to trim and remove trees to reduce outages.

Eversource also said it has taken a variety of other steps since Isaias to ensure that it is better prepared for storms. Its emergency response plan has new data functionality, a more streamlined response process and increased capacity, the company said.

The company is investing tens of millions of dollars each year in strengthening its delivery system, installing stronger poles, stronger “tree wire” and “smart switches” that can help operators isolate outages. It has implemented drone technology to identify repair locations, increased outreach to customers with medical needs and expanded capabilities for online outage reporting.

“Since Tropical Storm Isaias, we’ve been listening to our customers, community leaders and regulators, and we’ve used that feedback to improve our Emergency Response Plan (ERP),” Eversource President of Electric Operations Craig Hallstrom said. “Storms are happening more frequently and are more intense. Since Isaias we’ve had 10 significant storms in Connecticut that in total caused more than 409,000 outages across the state and we quickly responded and restored power to our customers. We continue working hard to strengthen the system to better withstand the fierce weather we’ve been seeing. While we can’t prevent storms from happening, we understand that customers depend on us to restore power as quickly and safely as possible and we take that responsibility seriously.”

t.hartz@theday.com