LIPA officials call upgrade ‘huge value’

John Santa

Long Island Power Authority officials touted the power authority’s “electricity reliability upgrade” last week as a project that will have “huge value for the area” once new underground power lines are placed in four of Great Neck’s nine villages this summer.

Nicholas Lizanich, LIPA’s Vice President of T&D Operations, was unable to provide the exact starting date of the power authority’s electricity reliability upgrade project during a Great Neck Village Officials Association meeting at Kensington Village Hall last Wednesday.

But LIPA District Manager Lauren Brookmeyer, said the project will be concluded sometime in August.

“It’s a couple of months of work,” Lizanich said. “It’s not like it’s two or three days of effort.”

Starting sometime in the next few weeks, LIPA crews will begin the project to place underground electrical cables beneath streets in the villages of Great Neck, Kensington, Thomaston and Great Neck Plaza.

Once the lines are replaced, Lizanich confirmed last week that crews contracted by LIPA will repave the roadways from the middle of the road to the curb.

“We’re just happy that we’re going to get the circuits in the ground,” Lizanich said. “It will be a huge value for the area.”

When the “electricity reliability upgrade” project was originally announced in March, it was met with hostility from village officials who were critical of LIPA’s plan to dig two-feet wide, by three-feet deep trenches down the middle of the effected roads to place the wires.

In April, that plan then changed to a “directional boring” method, which would have been more costly to LIPA, but without tearing up village streets.

“We actually thought we’d be able to drill it, but there’s too much stuff in the ground,” Lizanich said. “It’s just can’t happen.”

And that is when, following a meeting with several local mayors late last month at Kensington’s Village Hall, LIPA agreed in principal to place the underground wires then repave the road from the median to the curb.

“Our contractor has now come to the table and agreed to help the situation by dealing with the paving issue and helping to broaden out the patch on the road, so that it becomes half the street, as opposed to a third, or a fourth, of the street,” Lizanich said.

Great Neck’s “electricity reliability upgrade” is intended to prevent power outages that residents have frequently experienced during inclement weather during summer and winter storms.

LIPA will install new electrical cables from the substation near Gilchrest Road through streets in Thomaston before connecting with Beverly Road in Kensington and Middle Neck Road, Nirvana Avenue and Wood Road in Great Neck Plaza and the Village of Great Neck.

In Thomaston, lines will be installed at Windsor Drive and go down Colonial Road to East Shore Road. The Thomaston portion of the project will also include digging underneath the Long Island Rain Road tracks near the Colonial Road Bridge.

Lizanich confirmed last week that the project will “start on the western circuit that comes out of the station toward … Kensington.” 

“Then I think the line toward Thomaston will be the second phase,” he said.

The contract with LIPA’s contractor was scheduled to be signed on Monday, Brookmeyer said.

“You might even see the crews out here starting to do the work,” Lizanich added. “They may already have started.”

In addition to its “electricity reliability upgrade”, LIPA also last month announced its project to strengthen its electricity delivery system for 2,275 people in the Village of Lake Success.

Work on that project will involve replacing insulators, transformers and lighting arresters on suspended wires in the vicinity of Lakeville Road, Hillside Avenue and Lowell Avenue in Lake Success.

Although LIPA’s work this summer in Great Neck will not physically reach all nine villages, Lizanich said improved service will be noticed across the peninsula.

“It will help everybody because what it does is it redistributes the loads amongst the existing circuits and that will give us back-up capability as well as ability to serve the customer loads,” Lizanich said. 

If any major storms hit the area before work is completed, Lizanich also said LIPA has recently taken steps to ensure for safe and reliable service in Great Neck.

“We did put a contingency plan in place and you may have noticed a few of the trucks in this area working here,” Lizanich said. “We did put some additional configuration changes in place, so that we can better distribute the (electrical) load around to accommodate the lack of that circuit being in place.”

“I’m very confident,” he added, “that if anything potentially happens we’ll be okay.”

Along with discussing the peninsula’s pending “electricity reliability upgrade” project, the LIPA officials also informed village officials during last week’s meeting of the ways the power authority has improved its emergency response service.

Lizanich said the power authority intends to have more crews in place to service Great Neck in the event of an emergency. He said LIPA has also worked to improve it communication between village officials, the power authority’s administration and its crews.

“We will … be more responsive than we have in the past,” Lizanich said. “We will continue to work on things that will help us better prepare, both in preparation with our customers and constituents and such, but also prepare the system for the events we have.”

And that will certainly be the case in the event of another emergency situation like Tropical Storm Irene, which left thousands of local residents without power for days, Lizanich said.

“When it does happen, we’ll do our darndest to deal with it and communicate in the process,” he said. 

In other business, Village of Saddle Rock Mayor Dan Levy announced his plan during the meeting to attract residents in his village to install solar panels on their homes.

Levy said his home has been fitted with solar panels for the past three years.

“I’ve been going green everywhere I can,” Levy said. “I’m encouraging residents to build solar panels.”

As part of the solar-panel initiative in Saddle Rock, Levy said he is “streamlining the application process to make it simple just like we did with the generators.”

Levy said the installation of solar panels will benefit residents looking to save money on utility bills and in the event of an outage.

“Cost-wise and structure-wise it will attract more people to do it,” Levy said of his solar-panel initiative. “I think it’s to the benefit of everybody. It’s simple. It’s not that complicated.”

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