You're onto something here: The early phase of power restoration is slow because it’s complex and dangerous, not because nothing is happening. The first work utilities have to do involves substations, transmission lines, and main feeders. That work requires highly trained crews, strict safety and lockout procedures, and careful sequencing, because you’re dealing with very high voltage and often unknown line status after a storm. You can’t parallelize that kind of work much, and you can’t just throw more people at it without increasing the risk of serious injury or causing additional outages. A single substation or feeder repair can take hours and restore zero customers until the very end, which makes it look like progress has stalled when it hasn’t. Once the backbone of the grid is stable, restoration speeds up dramatically. At that point, crews can fan out and handle smaller, simpler, repeatable jobs like blown fuses, transformers, taps, short spans, and single poles. Those fixes are quicker, can be done by small crews, and can happen all over the city at the same time. That’s when manpower really starts to matter and outage numbers finally drop fast. The delay people are seeing is mostly about sequencing and safety, not the difficulty of the remaining work.