For Residents and Officials, Storm Response Still Resonates
Carmel resident Mark Baltazar has lived in his home on West Shore Drive for over 15 years. Throughout this time, Baltazar and five other houses that sit within the 2-mile stretch of road have been dubbed the 1 percent.
“We are the ‘1 percenters’ when it comes to electricity,” said the CEO and managing partner of Broadstreet, a Manhattan-based creative marketing and communications agency.
What has helped define a nationwide movement is now used as a device to describe the “West Shore Six,” a group of houses that lose electricity for an extended period of time at least a couple times a year. According to Baltazar, while other homes on his road enjoy seemingly speedy electricity restorations, the Six find themselves powerless for a week or more at a time, both literally and figuratively.
Hurricane Irene and October’s freak Nor’easter were obviously no exception. Though he is accustomed to outages and maintains an understanding attitude when they do occur, what Baltazar has not come to terms with is the repeated lack of communication that leaves many residents without a game plan and a clue to when the power might come back on.
“During this last storm, I was on NYSEG’s website looking at updates as to when power was going to be restored, and over that week there were seven estimates and not one of them were correct, except for the last one,” Baltazar said. “Customer service is there just to deflate people’s frustration because they really cannot do anything—all they can do is look at a computer screen with a little more than I have.”
Tired of hearing customer representatives claim to “understand his frustration,” Baltazar took to Twitter after Hurricane Irene to voice his objections and try to create two-way communication between his account, @WestShoreSix, and NYSEG’s, @NYSEandG. Launching his first tweet, “We’re six houses in Carmel NY with no power surrounded by dozen of houses who have had power for days. HELP!! @NYSEandG!!!!,” Baltazar began his quest to create a more inclusive dialogue.
“It’s been a way for me to keep a communication flow out there and to try to draw like-minded people who are interested in the discussion,” Baltazar said. “I’m hoping one day that NYSEG elevates what they communicate to their customers and to use Twitter as a two-way tool.”
In an effort to open up and foster this discussion between utility companies and their customers face-to-face, officials, emergency personnel, community members and representatives from NYSEG, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and Con Edison of New York met at Yorktown Town Hall on Dec. 8. Led by state Sen. Greg Ball, the roundtable sought to brainstorm ways to reduce response times to produce quicker restoration rates through better preparation.
“This is not a pep rally or hearing to attack the utility companies or first responders,” Ball said. “This is about figuring out what went wrong and implementing change so we call all work together to prevent future outages.”
Putnam County Chief Investigator Gerald Schramek said that Sheriff Don Smith referred to the county as the “ground zero” of the storm, but emergency personnel, first responders and highway department workers were well prepared to tackle the snow’s challenges.
“The one thing that we did note that we should probably see if it can be improved on is the flow of information before, during and after the storms,” Schramek said. “Perhaps the variable message board system that the New York State [Department of Transportation] uses may be an answer.”
Yorktown Highway Superintendent Eric Dibartolo suggested that a special liaison be assigned to a specified area so damage assessment can made on a firsthand basis, rather than relying on indirect reports made by the public.
“It would be absolutely impossible for anybody to stand there and point a finger at any utility company and say ‘you didn’t do the right thing’ but would help us and would help the residents and would help the constituents throughout the entire state is just to give us a person,” Dibartolo said. “The one thing that would work phenomenal from an emergency management point-of-view hands down would just be somehow [the liaison] would be able to physically be there and not through the phone.”
While ConED representative Anthony Tropy was open to enhancing this personalized taskforce, NYSEG representative James Salomon said the utility company may cover too much ground to deploy individuals to specific municipalities.
“Although our customer base is much smaller than ConED, we have just under 900,000 electricity customers, we cover over 40 percent of New York State geographically—we are a very rural utility company and our region alone covers 10,000 square miles that are noncontiguous islands of service,” Salomon said.
For residents like Baltazar and the rest of the West Shore Six, the solution can be achieved by simple persistence.
“This is hugely a management investment issue and the problem is when people’s power comes back on, they seem to forget about it,” Baltazar said. “But with these two storms happening in a row just made me go ‘I’m going to push this until something happens.’”
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.