N.Y. Power Won’t Be Fully Restored Until Late Sunday, ConEd Says
More than 800,000 were in in the dark in New Jersey. And 930,000 were down in Connecticut.
(Bloomberg) -- Some New Yorkers won’t have their power restored until Sunday night after Tropical Storm Isaias battered the U.S. East Coast, snapping trees, downing utility poles and leaving millions of homes and businesses in the dark.
“Damage has been extraordinary,” said Matthew Sniffen, Consolidated Edison Inc’s vice president of emergency preparedness. About 176,000 of the utility’s New York customers remained out of service at 5:15 p.m.
Across the state, more than 500,000 New Yorkers served by ConEd and others were without power. More than 1 million remained in the dark across New Jersey and Connecticut.
It’s the second-largest storm-related outage in ConEd’s history, following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. High winds damaged homes and tore limbs from trees as the storm swept up the coast from North Carolina on Tuesday. The outages are hitting at an especially difficult time as millions work from home instead of commuting to office buildings, which often have back-up generators.
Nearly 500 roads are blocked by fallen trees, and more than 7,000 wires are down, ConEd said. Avangrid Inc.’s United Illuminating, which serves Connecticut, also said outages could last for days.
Delays in restoring power prompted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont to call for probes of their states’ electric utilities. Cuomo has previously suggested a government takeover of Consolidated Edison Inc., after power outages last year.
“The large volume of outages and the utilities’ failure to communicate with customers in real time proves they did not live up to their legal obligations,” Cuomo said in a statement Wednesday. “Their performance was unacceptable.”
Outages of more than 100,000 affected Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Meanwhile in Virginia, Dominion Energy Inc. said it’s restored 80% of the more than half million customers that lost power, and all should be getting electricity by Friday. Repairs may be complicated because of restrictions on movement related to the pandemic.
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