By: Power Engineering |
PPL Electric Utilities said Nov. 1 that it has restored power to more than half of its customers in Pennsylvania who were without electricity after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast region.
As of 9 a.m. EDT, service has been restored to nearly 220,000 customers with 197,000 customers still out of service. Almost all of the more than 66,000 customers in PPL’s Harrisburg and Lancaster, Pa. regions have had power restored.
Crews that have finished work in those areas are being redirected to northeast Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley where about 90 percent of the outages remain. PPL hopes to restore electricity to 70,000 customers there by the end of the day Nov. 1, most of them in the Lehigh Valley, Bucks and Montgomery counties and the Poconos area.
“We continue to make progress, and the more than 5,000 people supporting the restoration effort – including more than 3,000 workers in the field – have started to turn the tide,” said Dave Bonenberger, vice president of Distribution Operations for PPL Electric Utilities. “But we still have a lot of hard work ahead. Right now, we have more workers out there making repairs than in any previous storm.”
Meanwhile, Consolidated Edison (ConEd, NYSE: ED) reported its workers have restored electricity to more than 225,000 customers in New York with more than 670,000 customers are still out of service as of 4:30 a.m. EDT Nov. 1, including 227,000 in Manhattan, 103,000 ni Queens, 59,000 in Brooklyn, 83,000 in Staten Island and 36,000 in the Bronx. The company said it expects to make significant progress restoring electricity over the next couple of days due to damage assessments and field work planning.
ConEd restored power Oct. 31 to two underground electrical networks that were taken out of service Oct. 29 as floodwaters from the storm surged. One network serves 2,000 customers in lower Manhattan, while the other served 28,200 customers near Coney Island, Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay.
Public Service Electric & Gas Co. (PSE&G) has restored electricity to about 920,000 customers, with 780,000 still without power in New Jersey as of 2 a.m. Nov. 1.
As of Oct. 31, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reports there are more than 6,200,000 people in the U.S. without electricity, down from 8.2 million immediately after the storm hit.
