As utility crews Thursday continued the monumental task of reconnecting hundreds of thousands of Connecticut homes and businesses that lost power due to Tropical Storm Isaias, residents of some of the state’s hardest-hit towns had resigned themselves to more days in the dark.

In Hebron, where 99% of customers remained without power, Ashley Pepe’s father spent the morning chainsawing downed branches while her husband was tossing out food at Sayulita Mexican restaurant in South Glastonbury, where he works as a chef.

“They decided today they can’t keep anything,” Pepe said.

A tree in her yard came down across Burrows Hill Road during the storm. By Thursday afternoon, there was still no sign warning drivers of the blocked route ahead.

Pepe’s gun-shy hound dog, Tessa, barks at every car and truck that turns around in front of her house.

“It happens all day, every day,” she said.

One Eversource truck came by to assess the damage and leave traffic cones, Pepe said. No tree crew has been out.

An Eversource executive said Thursday afternoon that the utility expected to have “a large chunk” of its customers restored by the end of the weekend but gave no estimate for when everyone would get their power back. United Illuminating said it expected to have the majority of its customers restored by the end of the day Saturday.

“They’ve been saying by the weekend they may have the [town] center done so I know we’re not a priority,” Pepe said. “No one seems to care.”

The fierce storm knocked out power to more than 800,000 Eversource customers alone, and outages remained at about 500,000 Thursday afternoon. While Eversource said customers in each of the 149 towns it serves were impacted, outages varied widely between towns.

Powering up at charging stations

Lucy Sobielo and her sister lost power as they were on the phone with each other Tuesday afternoon. Four hours later, it was back on at her sister’s house in Manchester.

“But, you know, that’s the city,” said Sobielo, 69.

Sobielo, who lives in the Amston section of Hebron, only saw one power truck, and and no tree crews, despite the massive oaks that have come down on busy, two-lane roads.

She pulled out her old camp stove and drove into town to buy propane canisters so she heat tea and cans of soup.

“In times like this, you learn to go back to the old ways,” Sobielo said.

She also stopped by the charging station at Hebron Town Hall — a room with outlets and a picnic table with a power strip outside but her flip phone doesn’t have service, anyways.

“I saw the Eversource guy pull in and I wanted to chase him and say, ‘When do you think it’s going to come back?’ ”

Alexandra Hall, 34 and her brother-in-law Arthur Vallin, 32, who relocated from Harlem when the pandemic started, brought their work to the Hebron charging station.

They’re the executive producer and creative director of a production company and on a time crunch to edit interviews for a new podcast airing in September.

On Wednesday, Hall and Vallin worked in their parents’ wooded backyard to produce a phone interview between their host in New York and Lee Daniels, director of “Precious” and “Empire,” in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, their parents pulled buckets of water from a children’s pool to flush the toilets inside.

“With someone that high profile, you only get an hour so you make it work,” Hall said. “Hopefully [power] comes back tomorrow because we have about five interviews scheduled.”

A tree crew spent Thursday afternoon at Jim Beaudoin’s house in Chester to clean up a maple tree that Isaias’ winds snapped in half. Like more than half of the town, he remained without power.

“We’re gonna try to save half of it,” Beaudoin said of the maple, which turns orange in the fall. “I told my wife I would. She was just about in tears over that tree.”

At the town’s firehouse, residents prepared macaroni and cheese with ham, tossed salad and garlic bread for the firefighters and other town employees who had been working since Tuesday. Residents stopped by to fill up jugs and charge their cellphones.

Snarled traffic, dangerous intersections

In towns suffering their third day of widespread blackouts, libraries became Wi-Fi centers and phone-charging stations while major intersections turned into tests of patience. In some spots, the few fast food and doughnut shops with power got so popular that their drive-thru lines snaked onto major streets, blocking traffic.

“Dunkin Donuts was like that again today — I told the [police] chief that something has to give. We don’t want an accident situation,” Bristol Mayor Ellen Zoppo-Sassu said Thursday, the second morning in a row when morning rush-hour coffee-seekers extended the drive-thru line onto busy Route 6.

Frustrated motorists in the right lane waited in apparent traffic jams for minutes at a time, only to pull forward and realize the backup was just to get into the shop’s parking lot. A similar situation played out at Dunkin Donuts shops on Route 10 in Simsbury and on Route 44 in Canton.

People who’d lost Wi-Fi were working outside the Westport library and on the lawn in front of the Simsbury Staples.

“We have Wi-Fi — its been intermittent all day, but there are people working in their cars in the parking lot. The row closest has the best connection,” a reference librarian at Southington’s library said.

In Burlington, Simsbury and other towns, some roads were still impassable — or treacherous looking — Thursday morning. A state trooper watched from a patrol car as motorists on Canton Road between Canton and Burlington alternated driving over a downed power wire alongside a broken tree that narrowed the busy street. Town hall in Burlington was knocked offline by Tuesday’s storm, and First Selectman Ted Shafer posted his cell number on Facebook for residents to call in emergencies.

Shafer has been working from West Hartford to be able to communicate because cellphone and internet service in Burlington has been weak to nonexistent.

“We need power back on, but we also need cell service, cable service, phone and Wi-Fi,” Shafer said.

Late Thursday, crews got generators to the town’s firehouse to power AT&T, Sprint and Verizon equipment on the major cell tower there.

“There was good news: Residents should be seeing stronger signals,” Shafer said.

One of the biggest challenges in many communities: Darkened traffic lights at high-traffic intersections. Facebook posts in town after town showed drivers’ frustration at trying to negotiate four-way stops with neither traffic controls nor police on hand.

“Since most of y’all have seem to forgot: When a traffic light is out, you treat it as a three-way or four-way stop,” Cassie Lynn Nimro wrote on the Bristol Talks group page. “You do not just keep driving through on your merry little way.”

Municipal leaders cautioned that residents seeing power crews in their towns should guard against overly optimist expectations.

“People are going to have to be patient, there’s a lot of damage,” Zoppo-Sassu said. “The crews we’ve had in Bristol are working hard. Some of the Eversource workers who’ve been here are Bristol residents.”

While Eversource has faced fierce criticism for its response to the storm, some shoppers at the Big Y in Tolland, where 67% of the town remained without power Thursday afternoon, were more understanding.

“You know what? It’s life,” said Doreen Midford.

Midford, who owns Doreen’s Country Pet Grooming in Tolland, said her business is set back about 650 feet from the road and she’s not expecting to have her power restored for a week or two.

Bill Kucko of Willington said the utility picked a fortuitous time to raise its rates.

“In all fairness to the line crews” Isaias was an intense storm, he said, adding that he couldn’t say much about management.

John Lebel of Stafford Springs said he was not willing to blame Eversource.

“It’s a bad storm. You have to bend a little,” he said.

Others were less forgiving.

“I think it stinks,” said a Tolland resident named Susan who declined to give her last name.

“We’ve been through this before,” she said. “They could have been better prepared.”

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.

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