O&R, Con Ed Send Crews To Florida In Wake Of Hurricane Irma

About 85 electric power line restoration workers and support personnel from Con Edison and Orange & Rockland Utilities left New York Sunday to assist in the recovery and restoration efforts from Hurricane Irma. The crews have been assigned to help with restoration efforts in and around Tampa, Florida.

O&R crews bedded down last night in Richmond, Virginia on their way to Florida.

They and Con Ed crews will be working to restore power for Tampa Electric Co.in Plant City, just east of Tampa. At 10: 45 am Monday, TECO was reporting 333,357 customers out of power. That’s 46 percent of TECO’s customers.

An additional 60 private contractors specializing in overhead electrical work and tree clearance had been dispatched to assist in the recovery efforts by both utilities Friday.

The company personnel and contractors are joining a massive mutual assistance effort involving thousands of utility personnel from other states.

O&R also provided assistance to relieve high outage reporting volume at TECO’s Customer Service Call Center. O&R installed a computer app to link its Call Center telephone system to TECO’s, permitting O&R’s own Customer Service representatives to field customer outage reports that were forwarded from Tampa. That assistance will continue into the week.

In all, about 3 million Florida residents have had their electricity knocked out by Hurricane Irma’s destructive winds.

The O&R company crews are prepared for a two-week deployment in Florida.

Consolidated Edison, Inc. (NYSE: ED) is one of the nation's largest investor-owned energy companies, with approximately $12 billion in annual revenues and $49 billion in assets. The company provides a wide range of energy-related products and services to its customers through its two regulated utility subsidiaries, Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc., and Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc., and its two unregulated energy businesses, Con Edison Clean Energy Businesses, Inc., and Con Edison Transmission, Inc.

PHOTO/ contributed