More than 7,700 New City Customers Remain Without Power

The majority of Orange & Rockland customers without electric service in New City are connected to one of four affected circuits. That means they will get their power back more quickly than smaller, isolated outages.

The four affected areas are:

• Ardsley, Buena Vista, Badger with 2,112 customers
• South Little Tor Road, Carolina, Collyer with 1,764 customers
• North Main Street, Christopher, Gladys Gail with 1,277 customers
• Beaumont, Zucker and Craigmere with 1,366 customers

“The good news about that is once those (circuits) are fixed, big blocks of customers will come back into service,” says Mike Donovan, O&R spokesman. “Under our protocols, we do the biggest jobs first. 

The four impacted neighborhoods in New City are also the four largest parts of Clarkstown without power. O&R is not specifically saying when power will be restored but expects that the majority of its 60,000 customers in its entire service area who lost power over the weekend will have service restored by midnight Friday with the rest regaining service over the course of the weekend. Throughout Rockland, 24,000 customers are lost service. Customers can view a outage map to see how many people are affected in their area and when service is expected to be restored.

O&R says its was extensively damaged by Hurricane Irene’s high winds and heavy rains. Nearly 110,000 O&R customers lost electric service at some point during the storm. More than 40,000 customers have had their service restored. 

More than 180 O&R, contractor and mutual aid crews from as far as Michigan and Texas are performing emergency public safety equipment removals, assessing damage and conducting system repairs. One of the 40 crews from Michigan, that drove 983 miles to help, was on Red Hill Road this morning working on power lines. According to O&R the crews are being scheduled on an around-the-clock basis in a manner to assure the safest and fastest restoration of service to our customers.

Due to the severity of the storm, many of these restoration efforts will require a rebuilding of portions of our electric system. Work is being prioritized in a manner that restores the greatest number of customers in the shortest period of time. However these efforts continue to be significantly hindered by extreme flooding and downed trees, which have severely limited travel throughout the service area.

Heavy rains from Hurricane Irene have also impacted O&R’s gas system. Extensive flooding had required the shut off of over 500 gas customers as a precautionary measure. 

O&R issued safety guidelines.

• For safety’s sake, don’t touch or approach any downed wires. Call O&R immediately at 1-877-434-4100 and let line crews safely deal with the problem.
• If your electric service is interrupted, don’t assume that O&R knows about the problem or that your neighbor has called in a report. Call O&R at 1-877-434-4100 or use our online Electric Outage Report form to report the outage. 
• Also, if flooding from Hurricane Irene has damaged your home or business and compromised your electric or gas service, treat that situation as an outage and report it to O&R as well.
• If you think you smell natural gas, call O&R’s Gas Emergency Hotline at 1-800-533-5325.

If you are using a home generator to supply your electricity during an outage of your O&R service, please make sure that you open the main circuit breaker in your home before starting the generator. If you don’t, the power the generators is creating can feed electric current back into the damaged lines on the street or in the air and may injure a neighbor, passerby or O&R worker.