Frustration mounts over lingering power outages

FRANK ELTMAN

TOM HAYS

Asso­ci­ated Press

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — Vin­cent Pina finally saw a cou­ple of util­ity trucks com­ing down his street Thurs­day and started to wave in antic­i­pa­tion. But they just cruised past his house and kept on going.

He hung his head in resignation.

“The thing that gets me the most is that there is no flood dam­age. I don’t have any branches down. I have no wires down,” said the Long Islander, who put a hand-painted sign out front that read: “Still No Power.”

So why, he won­dered, was it tak­ing so long to get electricity?

A week and a half after Super­storm Sandy slammed the coast and inflicted tens of bil­lions of dol­lars in dam­age, hun­dreds of thou­sands of cus­tomers in New York and New Jer­sey are still wait­ing for the elec­tric­ity to come back on, and lots of cold and tired peo­ple are los­ing patience. Some are demand­ing inves­ti­ga­tions of util­i­ties they say aren’t work­ing fast enough.

An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the calls for an inves­ti­ga­tion Thurs­day, rip­ping the util­i­ties as unpre­pared and badly managed.

“Pri­vately I have used lan­guage my daugh­ters couldn’t hear,” he fumed. He added: “It’s unac­cept­able the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, people’s suf­fer­ing is worse.”

The power com­pa­nies have said they are deal­ing with dam­age unprece­dented in its scope and doing the best they can. And there is no deny­ing the mag­ni­tude of what they have done: At the peak, more than 8.5 mil­lion homes and busi­nesses across 21 states lost power. As of Thurs­day, that was down to about 750,000, almost entirely in New York and New Jersey.

And that’s after a nor’easter overnight knocked out power to more than 200,000 cus­tomers in New York and New Jer­sey, eras­ing some of the progress made by util­ity crews.

“We lost power last week, just got it back for a day or two, and now we lost it again,” said John Mon­ti­cello of Point Pleas­ant Beach, N.J. “Every day it’s the same now: Turn on the gas burner for heat. Instant cof­fee. Use the iPad to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world.”

The mount­ing crit­i­cism came as New York City and Long Island fol­lowed New Jersey’s lead and announced odd-even gaso­line rationing to deal with fuel short­ages and long lines at gas sta­tions; the Fed­eral Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency started bring­ing mobile homes into the region; and Cuomo said the storm could cost New York State alone $33 billion.

New Jer­sey did not have a dam­age esti­mate of its own, but oth­ers have put Sandy’s over­all toll at up to $50 bil­lion, mak­ing it the sec­ond most expen­sive storm in U.S. his­tory, behind Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, which swamped New Orleans in 2005.

Sandy killed more than 100 peo­ple in 10 states, with most of the dead in New York and New Jersey.

The power industry’s defend­ers have pointed out that Sandy was huge and hit the nation’s most densely pop­u­lated cor­ri­dor. By the Energy Department’s reck­on­ing, it left more peo­ple in the dark than any other storm in U.S. history.

It did more than knock down power lines; it flooded switch­ing sta­tions and sub­sta­tions, forc­ing work­ers to take apart hun­dreds of intri­cate com­po­nents, clean them, replace some of them, rewire oth­ers and put it all back together. Only after these sta­tions are re-energized can work­ers go out and repair lines.

In Rock­away Beach in Queens, crews worked Thurs­day to inspect the flooded, muck-filled util­ity tun­nels that carry cur­rent. Before they descended into the man­holes, Ed Sell­man used a 3,400-gallon vac­uum truck to suck up the sand coat­ing the sub­ter­ranean cables.

“We try to get it clean, so when they go down there to do the inspec­tions, they can see and aren’t work­ing in mud like pigs,” Sell­man said.

Around the region, though, cus­tomers were frus­trated and in some cases furi­ous, com­plain­ing that they were being left in the dark about when power would be restored.

Ralph Barone of Staten Island said he saw a Con­sol­i­dated Edi­son crew in his neigh­bor­hood on Thurs­day for the first time since Sandy killed the power.

“The prob­lem is that they won’t tell you any­thing about when the elec­tric­ity will come back,” he said. “My wife is freez­ing. You need a flash­light to use the bath­room. It gets old.”

Barone works assem­bling meters for another power com­pany, “so I under­stand it’s a big job,” he said. “But nine days is too long.”

New York’s Demo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nor blasted the util­i­ties as “name­less, face­less” monop­o­lies that weren’t up to the job, com­plain­ing: “They ran out of poles, believe it or not. … How do you run out of poles?”

“The man­age­ment has failed the con­sumers. It is just that sim­ple,” said Cuomo, whose power at his own home in the sub­urbs has been on and off.

Cuomo appears to be all by him­self among the New York area’s big three politi­cians. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended Con Ed and said it has done a good job in recent years. And New Jer­sey Gov. Chris Christie praised the util­i­ties, say­ing he expects all of the state to have power back by early Sun­day. New Jer­sey had about 400,000 out­ages on Thursday.

“The vil­lain in this case is Hur­ri­cane Sandy,” Christie said.

On Long Island, where more than 262,000 cus­tomers were with­out power and tem­pers were ris­ing, Long Island Power Author­ity spokesman Mark Gross would not com­ment on the crit­i­cism, say­ing only that the util­ity is focused on restor­ing power.

Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke said he expects the out­ages to be fixed in a cou­ple of days, and added, “I’m very sorry that so many peo­ple are suf­fer­ing because their lights are out.”

The Edi­son Elec­tric Insti­tute, the industry’s main lob­by­ing group, has called restor­ing power in Sandy’s wake the “sin­gle biggest task the util­ity indus­try has ever faced.” Brian Wolff, EEI senior vice pres­i­dent, said 67,000 util­ity work­ers from all around the coun­try are on the job.

“An hour with­out power is too long. Power is an essen­tial com­mod­ity. Our peo­ple get that. We are putting every resource to restor­ing power,” he said. But he added, “This was not a minor event.”

Even David Wright, pres­i­dent of the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Reg­u­la­tory Util­ity Com­mis­sion­ers, sounded a sym­pa­thetic note: “There are lim­its to what a util­ity can do. A super­storm is an extra­or­di­nary event, and in an extra­or­di­nary event you get extra­or­di­nary circumstances.”

Posted by AP News on Nov 8 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.