Hurricane Sandy Leaves 1.3
Million Still Without Power As Nor'easter Approaches ...................
NEW YORK -- Nearly a full week after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, more than
1.3 million electricity customers from West Virgina to Connecticut are still
without power as temperatures plunge below the freezing point at night.
Electrical utilities are turning into punching bags for elected officials and
ordinary residents alike. A gathering Nor'easter storm, meanwhile, threatens the
same region affected by Sandy with high winds, heavy rainfall and, in some
regions of Appalachia, snowfall as early as Wednesday. The storm could further
complicate power restoration efforts.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Saturday night that the
two-week-long restoration times proposed by the Long Island Power Authority
(LIPA) for parts of the Rockaways are "unacceptable." The city warned that
temperatures had fallen so low that seniors and others were at risk of
hypothermia, and urged those affected to seek city shelters or warming centers.
LIPA says on its website that it has 11,000 workers trying to restore the power
and that 90 percent of its customers would be back online by Wednesday.
In New Jersey, 37-year-old Eric Helders of Edison lost power during the storm
and did not get it back until late Sunday evening. To add insult to injury, when
he placed a call Thursday to his utility company, PSE&G, which still has 375,000
people without power as of Monday, he was told that he did have power.
"I said, 'Do you think I'd be calling you if I had power?'" he recalled early
Sunday evening. "Like everybody else, we've got a lot of old people and kids on
the block. I myself have a 2-year-old, and we're freezing our asses off."
Two hours after talking to The Huffington Post, tragedy struck Helders' block. A
neighbor's house just a few doors away burned down. Fire trucks rushed to the
scene, and he overheard one first responder say, "Goddammit, I can't see a
thing."
Within an hour, a PSE&G crew was on the scene, fixing things up, Helders said. A
request for comment to the utility company was not immediately returned. The
township's police department said that the fire was caused by a surge from an
electrical generator being used because the power was out, and that smoke and
water damage have now left the residence uninhabitable.
Downed trees, live wires and damaged houses have complicated the utility
companies' efforts to restore power. In many low-lying coastal areas, flooding
from Sandy's storm surges may have reached fuse boxes or transformers, forcing
the companies to undertake painstaking house-by-house inspections before they
turn power back on.
The Edison Electric Institute, the industry's trade association, says utility
workers from as far away as Hawaii have been involved in the 24/7 effort to
restore power across the region. A pair of incidents from the weekend
highlighted the dangers facing the workers: a PSE&G lineman was electrocuted by
a live wire on Saturday, and a New York City sanitation worker on Staten Island
Sunday was likewise sent to the hospital after getting shocked by electricity.
The power outages have also contributed to a climate of fear in some places. In
Long Beach, N.Y., where National Guard troops patrolled the street and the city
instituted a "strict" 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, one resident told HuffPost that
he had slept with a licensed, loaded .357 next to him for much of the week after
Sandy because he feared looters.
"It's not safe," he said. "You can't go out at night. There's no light."