Westchester County Executive George Latimer provided an update on Westchester power outages and utility response after Isaias.

Latimer said there are currently 7,049 residents without power out of 360,000 residents as of noon Tuesday.

He said most of the customers who use NYSEG have their power. 

Verizon, as a provider of voice data, has restored the vast majority of issues for customers.

Altice still has 10,300 customers out of a base of 213,000 that are without service. 

 

No power has caused tremendous issues.

He says his administration is going to be reviewing the United Westchester storm response report that was issued in 2018 after the Riley and Quinn storms, and will identify the recommendations and create an evaluation metric by the performance of 2020 against those things that were identified in 2018, including commitments made at that time. He said there is going to be a dialogue with the Westchester County Board of Legislators and other officials so everyone will be a part of the review. He said they are also going to analyze past reports on burying power lines, including estimated costs and the viability of it.

Latimer said he is working on fleshing out the utilities reserve team concept to have a back up reserve work force that can be called upon when a crisis hits.

He says people without power have reached the point that their utility bills should be reduced.

Latimer said some customers are no longer being notified of when they expect their power to be restored. 

He says there will be a review of the response both locally and by the state on what caused the slow restoration of power. 

Latimer said he is going to work very hard to lay out alternatives and discuss advocacy for customer compensation for having lost power. There are some food reimbursement situations now, but he says it's come to a point where there should be a reduction in people's utility bills to compensate for the loss of power. 

He says people will be without power can go to cooling centers during the day hours. 

Westchester County parks have reopened, but close around 6:30 p.m.

Latimer says he expects that all power will be restored in the next 24 hours.