The Village of Flower Hill Board of Trustees held a special presentation Tuesday night for members of National Grid and the Long Island Power Authority to speak with residents about how the utility companies have improved the quality of service since Superstorm Sandy last year.
Paul Mattera, National Grid’s manager of electric service, and Lauren Brookmeyer, the Long Island Power Authority’s district manager for government relations, held an hour-long question-and-answer session in which they outlined changes to the companies’ communications systems that will more quickly notify utility crews of outages and keep the public informed of power restorations.
In the event of a future storm, Mattera said LIPA will still hold conference calls with local municipalities updating them of outages and restoration efforts, but will hold separate calls for Nassau and Suffolk officials for more personalized information.
Mattera added LIPA is also working on replacing its paper records with a digital system that will send utility crew members into the field with tablets that track outages and restoration in real time, and create a mobile app that can track the exact location of a power outage. LIPA currently has a text message outage notification system.
“Eventually we’re going to be able to make an electronic connection from the field to our outage services so the outages are identified and will automatically come in,” Mattera said.
Mattera said that LIPA only learns of a transformer outage when residents call to notify them, but switches within circuit breakers go off to one of the company’s circuit substations during a high circuit outage to let the utility service company when an entire block loses power.
But during a storm, Mattera said, LIPA would have to send circuit crews out to inspect and repair the circuits based on the severity of damage and other information from its substations. In the aftermath of Sandy, LIPA managed approximately 6,000 utility crews working to restore power to the more than 900,000 customers who lost electricity.
Starting next year, the Newark, New Jersey-based Public Service Electric and Gas Company will manage LIPA’s services on a 10-year contract, beginning on Jan. 1, 2014.
But Mattera, Brookmeyer and Flower Hill Mayor Elaine Phillips each said they have no reason to believe PSE&G would not maintain even a variation of the service updates they described.
Phillips, who has met with PSE&G officials in the past, said the board debated whether to hold LIPA’s presentation at all but wanted to keep the village informed in the event of another Sandy-like storm before the end of the year.
“When I went through the process I thought, wait a minute, it’s Oct. 1 and we have to get through Dec. 31, and we could have another Sandy between today and then, so I felt it was worth our effort,” Phillips said.
Phillips added the village would also try to hold another presentation with PSE&G officials after the utility company begins its work on Long Island.
“They have been extremely open and willing to talk to us as elected officials,” Phillips said. “I don’t know if we’d get them in here Jan. 1 because I think it would be in our best interest to get them in here and let them get their feet wet a little bit, but in the spring I think we can do something similar.”
In other business, the board awarded a bid of $1,675 to the Elmont-based Vision Landscape to replace 25 trees lost in Sandy’s aftermath. Officials said the bid will be readjusted to account for one more tree that was requested after the bid was made.
In her report, Village Administrator Ronnie Shatzkamer said the CBS series “Person of Interest” will be filming in the village on Oct. 4 on Walter Lane. NBC officials have also expressed interest in using the village as a filming location for its new series, “The Blacklist.”
The board of trustees had set a public hearing at its Sept. 3 meeting to discuss and pass a local law that would establish its architectural review committee, but was unable to do so because of a miscommunication with the village’s stenographer, who was not in attendance to take minutes of the hearing.
