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WPCNR THE POWER STORY. By John F. Bailey. March 5, 2018 UPDATED 12:30 PM E.S.T.:UPDATED 1:30 PM EST.
Con Edison has moved back their estimate for complete restoration of power in Westchester County ( as of 11:30 A.M). to Thursday, by midnight according to their Storm Center “realtime” Map of outages.
Con Ed and New York State Electric and Gas are sticking to their promises of completing restoration by late today for NYSEG and 90% by Con Ed’s “powerless” by 11 PM tomorrow night, according to today’s Storm Update from Westchester County.
In a briefing in a Westchester County news conference Monday morning, Joan McDonald the County Director of Operations, said NYSEG was still maintaining it would complete its restoration of the now 19,802 NYSEG Customers in the northeast part of the county still without power by 11:45 PM today.(Editor’s Note: This deadline was missed, and NYSEG now promises it will have all their Customers restored by 11 PM Tuesday evening.)
She said Con Ed was still promising they would have power restored to 90% of the 41,261 (her number given in the briefing) without power by 11 PM tomorrow Tuesday, March 6.
You can see Ms. McDonald’s briefing on the County Facebook page, by going to westchestergov.com and clicking on the Facebook icon, and in the left hand column, go to Videos. Ms. McDonald’s video will come up, or paste this link into your browser:
https://www.facebook.com/westchestergov/videos/10156035280602092/
The Con Ed Pace of restoring power slowed overnight repowering approximately 1,000 Customers in the last 9 hours to bring down the number of Customers (a “customer” is counted as one meter) without power in Westchester County to 43,385 caused by 3,905 outages.
A phalanx of an estimated 100 repair crews from a number of states (Bob McGee of Con Edison said they were from Canada, Wisconsin and Texas) to help Con Ed with the restoration was assembling this morning at Rye.
This, despite the fact that the Public Service Commission Chairman John Rhodes at the news conference held late Sunday afternoon said “we are on our own,” unaware that power crews were unroute from Texas, Canada, Wisconsin, Michigan.
With the new crews supplementing the Con Edison force, the 43,385 “powerless” figure may begin to decline significantly by tomorrow.
The number of Westchester residents without power is up since 2 this morning when 41,654 had been reported on the Storm Center map as without power. Con Ed media spokesperson said the number of Customers without power out can go up and down because of switch off activity.
On Sunday, County Executive George Latimer in a news conference criticized Con Edison for not turning off power quickly when cities and towns had DPW crews ready to go and therefore they could not attack the tree and debris damage because of live power wires in the fallen trees. Mr. Latimer and the officials at the news conference said Con Ed came in quickly to make repairs once the debris were cleared to make the fixes necessary.
Today, WPCNR learned of an isolated experience in White Plains where White Plains DPW arrived with five trucks to clear a tree that was tangled in wires. The WP crew cleared the tree by 5 PM Sunday afternoon. As of 8 A.M. Monday morning no Con Ed repair crew had shown up to restore power to the block. This may be an isolated incident.
If persons have experienced similar experiences in Con Ed repair crews appearing on the scene after trees are cleared, please advise to wpcnr@aol.com
The manager of Stop & Shop in White Plains said the store expected to have enough food to handle the rush after power is restored to replenish spoiled food.
The manager said after about 2 hours of losing power, the food begins to spoil, and should not be consumed.
The status numbers WPCNR totaled from areas in Westchester County with the highest number outages published this morning at 1:30 A.M. have not changed too much.
Ms. McDonald said the county is also monitoring price gouging that has been reported as a result of the storm. She said that Con Edison has classified this storm as the fifth worst storm they have ever handled. She said she did not have the numbers from Con Edison on how many persons total are affected. She said the National Guard role was as the communities see fit, such as debris removal.