O&R: 21,600 Without Power in Rockland

Orange & Rockland continues to work to restore service to 21,600 customers in Rockland County that were still without power as of 9:44 a.m. Tuesday morning.

That includes 6,856 in Clarkstown, 2,952 in Orangetown and 407 in Nyack. O&R is still projecting to have power restored to 90 percent of its customers by midnight Wednesday, with the rest by Friday.

O&R Representative Cecille Jones responded to resident concerns raised by residents claiming that there are not enough workers out fixing the problem.

"Just because you don't see a truck in your neighborhood does not mean we are not working on the problem," Jones said. "We could be five blocks. Sometimes we are fixing something five miles away and they could get power. There could be a tree limb on a wire on their street, but we were able to reroute.

"Seeing the presence there, I know it's reassuring, but that doesn't mean we are not working."

Jones said that O&R has deployed over 1,000 workers, including their own crews, contractors and mutual aid crews from as far off as Florida, Michigan and Maryland.

"We pulled out all the stops," Jones said. "You've got to understand that this is a really unusual and widespread event. It is such a freak October storm. Nobody expected the extent of the damage.

"We had trees with a full canopy of leaves and the snow on them made them heavier. When snow usually happens, you don't have those leavs on the trees. Some time in the winter, when the trees are bare, (the snow) wouldn't create this kind of outage."

O&R put up a video with Mike Donovan of public relations addressing Saturday's storm and the damage it caused, also explaining that the issue was trees that hadn't lost their leaves yet holding too much snow for the branches to handle.

"The result is the trees retain the snow, they can't hold the strain and they collapse into the lines," Donovan said. "We have a lot of power outages."

O&R will be giving out ice again Tuesday at Provident Bank Park in Pomona. They will distribute wet ice from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and dry ice from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.