There was a lot of speculation about the hype of this hurricane. I live in downstate NY thirty miles from the long Island sound, so I had no concern about storm surges. It was windy the night before the storm hit my area, and it was windy after the storm left. The storm itself, in my area seemed a non event. I lost power, phone, internet, and useable cell service the morning the storm hit and just got them back two hours ago. I have never seen so much tree damage and flooded basements in my life. Even now, some areas of southern Connecticut have huge outages. All in all, I think we were very lucky that this storm was only a weak cat1.
Kurt Ullman wrote in news:F8ydnWAU85ky5 _zTnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:
Smiley noted.
I agree with the OP. On Sunday the rain had stopped before noon, and at 2 PM or so I was at my daughter's, and saw what was basically a twig that had fallen out of her big old hunking Norway maple. Two hours later 1/3 of the tree (2 or 3 big pieces off the main trunk) had fallen, luckily only a glancing blow at the house.
It takes days to repair power transmission lines...
Some power station transformers take time to obtain when the ones in service were destroyed by trees falling on them...
It would take tens of thousands of repair crews to restore power in mere hours after the storm was over -- let alone having to wait until the rains and wind have stopped.. Patching up downed 13,800 volt lines is not like playing with an extension cord in your backyard...
People need to actually LISTEN to what they are told to do by the authorities in these situations, not be stubborn and try to stick it out at their own homes pretending that they are still in control...
To the people bitching about not having power for days and days -- you were warned -- you had a week to go out and obtain a generator BEFORE the storm hit... You had a week to learn where the storm shelters were going to be located...
DO NOT BLAME the power company for your lack of preparedness, nor your ego/pride which has prevented you from seeking assistance at a storm shelter... Those things are your fault, not that of the power company...
Maybe you idiots will start listening now when the experts are telling you how fragile our infrastructure actually is... We were given a dose of this medicine in 2005 when Katrina hit but not too many people learned from it... The magic in our daily lives known as electricity is a fragile thing, an event that happens a thousand miles away can impact your electrical service... Transmission lines carry power thousands of miles to where the customers are using it are all interconnected so a failure of something far away can cause wide area cascading power outages...
If your life requires you to be on-line and able to update your Facebook status every few minutes then you need to actually put forth some effort on your own part to ensure that outcome is possible... I have a feeling that many people would still have complained even if their power had not gone out because their cable TV, FIOS services and internet went out during the storm and they are bored, tired, hungry and can't get any information because their computers are off-line...
Plain old telephone service actually provided by the phone company only suffered light damage -- cable companies offering "bundle services" were hit hard and could not access much of the network to make restorations until after the downed poles were repaired by either the power company or phone company which actually owns the poles and is responsible for them...
The line crews are working 16 hour shifts. One town selectman in CT complained that crews are not working 24 hours.
It is truly amazing to listen to the people and how ignorant they are of how the system works. They are accusing special treatment when the Woodstock Fairgrounds got power back before houses in the area. Well, they are on the main road so when the main line comes back, whatddayaknow, the lights go on. Not so on the impassable roads. where trees are down taking lines with them. . So they complain
There may be a little legitimacy that tree trimming has been cut back and was a contributing factor. I don't have any hared facts or evidence though.
How many hours a day have those little town DPW workers been putting in clearing trees in and around the downed power lines ?
Umm... None, the DPW cuts the trees off the street at the curb... The power company has to wait for the licensed tree companies to remove the trees from the lines before any work can be done to restore power...
All of these small town blowhards would have a lot more legitimacy if their workers were out doing their share, but it is not being done as no one has it in their budget...
Want a reliable power grid ? Build your own power plant in your own small town and see how good a job you can do when 20% of the trees in your town shed limbs after a hurricane...
Some of these selectmen and mayors of small towns expect to be treated like kings and have their every whim attended to when there are large commercial customers that were dark which meter more power through their factories in a month than some of those towns of 5,000 meter in six months total... Gotta start checking the grid from the primaries and repairing as you go down through the layers to the individual customers... That takes time...
15 years ago, when I moved to this house, we had power outages lasting around 4 hours, every couple of months. About a year later, NYSEG was fined by the public service energy commission for not maintaining the lines/ trees properly. At that time they made an obvious push to clean up their system, and for around 10 years I had no power outages. In the last few years, I've seen very little line maintenance , in fact very few line crews from both ConEdison and NYSEG. In the last few years, outages are becoming more prevalent and for longer durations. I just think that these power companies keep their crews down to a bare minimum, so when something major does occur, they're totally defenseless. In the six days that my power was out, I saw one NYSEG truck, on the sixth day. It took about 3 days to bring line crews from other states and Canada to help with the repairs, and I have to say, every crew I saw, worked like well oiled machines.
The obvious analogy is winter snow removal- you don't keep a equipment fleet for the once-in-a-blue-moon blizzard situation, you equip and staff for around 105% of your average requirements. No power company keeps enough trucks and crews for hurricanes- the rates they would have to charge the customers would be even higher. They depend on moving their trucks/crews around, mutual aid agreements with nearby power companies, and contracts with companies that do nothing but installation/repair work. After the Memorial day storm here, most of the crews setting new poles and lines here were of that last category.
As to keeping the right-of-ways clear- the local utilities had just done a cycle of that, and got a lot of blowback from how brutal they were about it in some neighborhoods, including situations where it would have been cheaper to reroute the line, rather than kill some beautiful mature specimen trees. So they are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
And yes, those crews do work like well-oiled machines. They have to, or somebody could end up dead, and they couldn't meet their daily quotas for poles in the ground and wire strung. I remember how happy I was after 4 days with no power, to be coming home from work and seeing six crews in a row, working on the last big missing chunk of main feeder that fed my neighborhood. This storm didn't just take down isolated poles- there were half-mile sections where ALL the poles were snapped and on the ground, and the wire a tangle of spaghetti. The repair was more like a new build-out.
As far as tree trimming goes, I own property in CT and I have a letter postmarked Mar 30 2011 notifying that they would be doing tree trimming in the area, so it would seem that they have done recent maintenance.
On the NY side of the Hudson, there was a lot of outages and flooding. Not from the Hudson River, but by all the streams and rivers that came down from the Catskill Mtns. that were overwhelmed by the amount of rain. Roads and Bridges flooded, and in some cases, destroyed. Two towns were almost wiped out. Prattsville and Margaretville.
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