Local officials and residents slammed the Long Island Power Authority’s response to Hurricane Sandy at a meeting in Great Neck Estates Monday night, castigating the utility for its storm preparations, restoration speed and its failure to provide accurate information to increasingly frustrated homeowners.
Great Neck Estates Mayor David Fox, state Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel, Nassau County Legislator Judi Bosworth, North Hempstead Town Councilwoman Lee Seeman and a spokesperson for Rep. Steve Israel addressed a vocal and discontented audience of about 50 residents, describing their storm relief efforts and casting LIPA’s communication efforts as ineffectual and unresponsive.
And residents in turn voiced their concerns, describing their struggles with the storm and advocating changes from the trimming of potentially dangerous trees to the placement of underground power lines .
“I’ve been twice a day on phone calls where [LIPA] gives you rhetoric, lies, outright nonsense,” said Fox, who called the extended blackout an “unpredecented incident.”
Municipal officials and the public had been told by LIPA that 90 percent of power would be restored by last Wednesday, Fox said – a date that was pushed back each day until Saturday, when LIPA reported that it had brought 93 percent of the authority’s electrical system online.
Mayors across the pensinsula told the Great Neck News they had not seen the dozens of line and tree crews LIPA reported sending to the peninsula shortly after the storm. Fox said that LIPA was ill informed about the location of their crews, because their electrical maps did not include the boundaries of Great Neck’s villages.
He also said that he felt deceived by LIPA’s assurances of increased manpower.
“We were definitely misled,” Fox said. “It was nonsense… we saw no trucks for the first week.”
LIPA did not return multiple requests for comment.
The elected officials at the meeting sat in reserved seats at the front of the village court room. Some of those seats, reserved for LIPA representatives, were empty.
Fox invited LIPA to send representatives, he said, but was informed that the authority’s senior management would not attend any public meetings until full power restoration had been achieved.
Schimel credited the town and municipal governments for their responsiveness and efforts to clean debris from roads, but said that LIPA had not learned from its experiences during Hurricane Irene.
“Nothing’s changed. Their playbook’s the same,” Schimel said.
The assemblywoman also described seeing six trucks that had been waiting for two days to fix lines because they did not have the utility poles needed to complete repairs.
All the while, Schimel said, LIPA had told her there was no problem with the supply chain for repair crews.
Ryan Stanton, a spokesperson for Israel, said LIPA had failed to provide reliable information to residents.
“They have this map online and it’s nonsense,” he said. “None of it is accurate.”
Bosworth described a sense of growing frustration, as initial satisfaction with LIPA’s twice-daily briefings turned bitter when days passed and little visible progress was apparent.
“There was this sense of not having any voice that was effective,” said Bosworth. “I have never experienced anything like this.”
Residents expressed their frustration with the utility and the storm that left many of them without power for 12 days.
“Who do we hold accountable?” said Dina Mor of South Circle Drive. “We can’t just stand here and wait every day to see if that truck is coming.”
Some residents advocated changing the electrical infrastructure to move power lines underground, but Fox said the expense of installing and maintaining such a system was untenable.
“Why don’t we rise up together and demand that LIPA bury the power lines? I don’t know why we don’t do that,” said Anne Wolfson of Hillside Avenue to applause.
After three consecutive years of damaging storms – 2010’s microburst, last year’s Hurricane Irene and Sandy – some residents feared that extended outages could be an annual occurrence.
Residents suggested ways to increase Great Neck’s storm preparedness, from building a cellular phone tower with backup generators on the peninsula to establishing long-term shelters in the case of outages.
Village of Kensington Mayor Susan Lopatkin also voiced concerns to the Great Neck News last week, decrying LIPA’s communications as insufficient.
Lopatkin said that at one point she had been told there were three crews working in Kensington, but was confident that was not the case.
“I know the village, and they ain’t here,” she said.
Lopatkin said she spoke to LIPA’s vice president of communications, who attributed the mix-up to a lack of information on the village’s borders.
The municipal conference calls also failed as a source of accurate information, said Lopatkin.
She described a system where local officials from all of Long Island had 15 minutes to question top LIPA officials, including Chief Operating Officer Michael Hervey, who announced his resignation on Tuesday, effective at the end of the year.
That made for about six questions per call, said Lopatkin, and did not guarantee useful answers.
““When you do get to ask a question, as I did a few days ago… it was wrong, because they didn’t know where Kensington was,” she said.
The other source of information for officials – a municipal hotline to LIPA’s communications staff – was also unhelpful, according to Lopatkin.
“I think it’s absurd. It’s probably criminal – not just me, [many] of the mayors have come to the same conclusion,” she said.
Lopatkin had planned to host a press conference last week with local legislators requesting increased resources from LIPA, but cancelled it hours before it was scheduled to begin.
“My main focus here is I must get my village residents power back,” she said last week, when much of Kensington still lacked electricity. “And I’m doing cartwheels and talking to every level of elected official and every LIPA representative on a constant basis to make my village’s needs known.”
