The last number of storms, dating back at least to the 2008 ice storm, the municipally owned utilities in southern New England were up in around three days, the investor owned ones took two weeks.
My favorite example for folks who may think, "But investor owned has more territory|the towns are all different|think of an excuse" ...Norwalk, Connecticut is divided just about in half. The municipal side was up in three days after Irene (or Sandy?) while the investor owned side was two weeks. There's several rural Massachusetts towns I know that have municipal systems that perform similarly -- so it's not just a "rural/urban" issue and the investor owned is busy fixing rural towns.
Best I can figure, the municipals are smaller with fewer employees -- but have more employees per customer so they can respond to trouble calls and new service requests on a timely basis with their smaller staffs. When they're not responding to customer issues, the linemen keep busy updating stuff like replacing old cross arms and such.
Eversource (the one I'm most familiar with) seems to really like their contractors, and keep their own linemen spread thin. They have been putting a lot of contractors into improving grid reliability against regular storms but that doesn't do that much when you're about to have a lot more damage to the grid than the ordinary wind storm. My own house is very reliable -- out of power for more than 8 hours twice in 22 years; once for Irene then for Isasis and that last one I was actually a victim of the grid improvements; they built a new second feed into the center of my town so they didn't have to fix the older main distribution lines in front of my house first before the rest of town.
