Grappling with the Power Outages: NYSEG, CenHud

Local power companies are sticking with midnight Wednesday as the time when electricity should be restored to most customers in Westchester and Putnam counties.

NYSEG spokesman Jim Salmon said 90 percent of that utility's customers should have power by then and the final few would have power by Friday.

Saturday's snowstorm was worse than Irene in some ways, he said—with 3.5 million people losing power along the storm's path.

"They were certainly similar in that there was a lot of damage from both," Salmon said. "This one is significant damage and a lot of road closures that are making accessibility somewhat difficult—very difficult in some cases."

CenHud spokesman John Maserjian said the vast majority of their 85,000 customers without power as of Monday morning will be back online by Wednesday night, but that's not to say it won't be restored sooner. CenHud serves several communities in western and northern Putnam.

"We are fortunate enough to have mutual aid that arrived last night," he said. "Two hundred line men have come in from Albany, Long Island and Chattanooga, TN. We have a field force of 500 today."

Maserjian also wanted to remind families prepping for possible trick or treating trips tonight that areas are still quite dark and visibility is limited. There are still downed lines tangled in trees and, as always, any downed wire should be treated as a live wire.

NYSEG is adding new tracking capability to its online storm center.

"We are going to be adding to our website this afternoon the estimated times of restoration for individual towns," Salmon said. "Customers can go on www.nyseg.com to our Outage Central section and they’ll be able to look up what their estimated restoration time is."