While powerless customers were “hamping” last week—a term coined, post-hurricane, for “camping at home in the Hamptons”—hundreds of line and tree repair crews from as far away as Arkansas put in 16-hour shifts and slept in dormitories at Stony Brook Southampton.
Asked if they bedded anywhere farther east, East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson joked, “I don’t know—I wouldn’t let them sleep.” The supervisor said he had been meeting with LIPA workers at the East Hampton Airport, where they were organizing, three times a day: “We’d literally be out there saying, pay attention to this area” or that one, he said.
“The crews on the ground were working incredibly hard,” Mr. Wilkinson said, adding that it was the first time some of them had ever seen the ocean.
“The guys on the ground did an outstanding job,” said State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. of 4,000 workers striving to restore electricity to 553,000 Long Island Power Authority customers in the days following Hurricane Irene.
“On the management level,” however, Mr. Thiele said on Saturday, “it was pretty clear that LIPA was not prepared for this.”
The phones in the assemblyman’s Bridgehampton office were ringing off the hook from Monday morning, the day after Irene hit, to late Friday afternoon, with calls from people who wanted to know when the lights would return. “You would answer one call, have somebody on hold, and the next caller would call in,” said Mr. Thiele, who is assisted by two staff members in Bridgehampton. “It points out how frustrated people were with the Long Island Power Authority.”
Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said much the same thing about her office: “Our phones were ringing off the hook. We were just LIPA Central.”
Rachel Lys of Cedar Ridge Drive in Springs was out of power from about 9 a.m. on Sunday to 5 p.m. on Friday. She has a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, is six months pregnant, and her house uses well water.
It was, she said, an “awful” six days: going out to crowded restaurants for expensive meals with cranky, tired kids, showering at friends’ houses, not being able to do laundry, losing all the food in the refrigerator, not being able to flush while potty-training her 2-year-old.
“My daughters are scared of the dark” and accustomed to night lights, she said, so she was “cracking glow-stick bracelets” for a substitute.
“Most people got it back before us,” she said. “Until Tuesday, we didn’t have any answers from LIPA. Then they told us Friday would be the earliest.” “They were working as hard as they could,” she said. “It was just an inconvenience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.”
Some might take solace in the fact that even the rich and well-connected lost their juice, often for extended periods. “I know for a fact that many property owners in Georgica didn’t have power as late as yesterday,” East Hampton Village Administrator Larry Cantwell said on Friday of the Georgica Beach area, from which, he said, he was getting “angry phone calls.”
While areas like Clearwater Beach in Springs were also relatively late to return to the grid, Mr. Cantwell said, “the village south of the highway suffered as much as anyone.”
At least some residents of Sagaponack Village, whose ZIP code is said to be the wealthiest in the nation, were still out of power on Saturday.
“The amazing part about it is that the LIPA grid is party and class agnostic,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “It can’t tell the rich from the poor, commercial from residential, those who have wells versus those who have city water.”
“The only difference” he said, was that there might have been “more generator activity” south of Montauk Highway enabling a “seamless” transition to backup power.
Mr. Cantwell, who lives in Northwest Woods, did not lose power, but Mr. Thiele, who lives in Sag Harbor, was without power for two days. “My power was out in excess of 30 to 35 hours starting before I even got home” the Sunday morning of Irene, said Mr. Wilkinson, who was out from 2 a.m. on that day.
In an August 30 press conference, LIPA’s chief operating officer, Michael D. Hervey, said the utility’s top priorities were to get power up for infrastructure—traffic lights, sewage plants—and critical facilities like hospitals, nursing homes and fire stations, as well as to as many individual customers as possible with each repair.
Southampton Hospital lost LIPA power for about 12 hours on Sunday, according to Marsha Kenny, director of marketing and public affairs, who lives in Remsenburg, where she herself was off the meter for about 24 hours.
“Within seconds we revert to a generator system” at the hospital, she said. “We were fine. We have a whole plan for stuff like that” and, in addition, had a relatively slow emergency room for a weekend in August.
The day after the storm, the Southampton Town supervisor’s office urged LIPA to bear in mind the importance of Labor Day weekend to the local economy. LIPA’s response, her office said, was that it had more than 200 workers on the ground working 16-hour shifts to address more than 60 “damage sites.” In addition, it said, there was a limited number of contractors, given the severity of Hurricane Irene’s impact on places in upstate New York and New England, that it could recruit from out of town.
During the August 30 press conference, LIPA’s Mr. Hervey had said that merchants and motel owners, who tend to be in downtown areas that are already densely developed, could be expected to be among those to regain power the earliest.
After the Labor Day weekend, on Tuesday, Ms. Throne-Holst said she had heard ancedotally that the weekend was “not quite on par with previous ones,” but that might have had nothing to do with the power authority. She said she thought LIPA officials “did heed the call ... they knew that that was a priority for us.”
Possibly, she said, people not knowing if there would be power didn’t come out, or they might have “packed up and left” before the storm struck.
Mr. Cantwell, the East Hampton Village administrator, also said, “I had people calling me from New York saying, ‘I don’t have power, should I come out?’”
Mr. Wilkinson said, however, that it was his “visceral” impression that Montauk, at least, had been “flooded” with visitors over Labor Day weekend, possibly because they held off from heading out east the previous weekend.
“I think that they did in fact the best they could under the circumstances,” Ms. Throne-Holst said. “The entire seaboard was out.”
“People were without power for literally weeks” after Hurricanes Bob and Gloria, she said. “They did better by us this time around.”
Like many others, she faulted LIPA most for its failure to pass along what Mr. Wilkinson called “accurate and forthright communication.”
“LIPA is not on these smart meters,” Ms. Throne-Holst said of meters that she said can feed “specific information from every single resident” and which are used in other communities.
Mr. Thiele said getting information from the power authority had barely been easier for elected officials than it was for regular Joes. “The issues we had were trying to get good information from the Long Island Power Authority,” he said, which made people frustrated, in turn, with public officials as well as with LIPA’s.
“It is one thing for a LIPA customer not to be able to leave the appropriate message of an outage,” East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said in a statement he read aloud at a Village Board work session last Thursday. “But when local government, i.e., your village, has to undergo phone transferal from one person to another seeking answers to substantive questions regarding power restoration, something is totally out of whack.”
In addition, Mr. Wilkinson, said, “all during this time people lost faith in the numbers.” LIPA’s Storm Center outage map would indicate there were seven outages in one neighborhood, say, while “people would say, there are 24 people on my own block!”
On Friday, Governor Cuomo issued a statement calling its response to the massive outages “not good enough” and threatening not to renew a contract with National Grid, which delivers electricity to LIPA, unless power was restored “now.”
State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle gave LIPA an “F” for its post-storm response last week, while East Hampton Village Mayor Rickenbach assigned what he called a “gracious” grade of “C-minus.”
“The biggest problem for us is we didn’t even have field operations contacts,” said Mr. Cantwell, the village administrator, on Friday. “You would think they would want to coordinate with our DPW and police, but it wasn’t until Wednesday that we had direct communication with field communication out here.”
“LIPA focuses on how many people are on a particular line,” Mr. Wilkinson said, and if there are 100 on one and only 7 on another, they’ll focus on the one with 100.
“The old grid, the way it’s laid out, is totally illogical,” he said. “It’s an antiquated, illogical grid, so it makes no sense at all.”
In East Hampton Town, he said, some of the worst-hit areas seemed to be parts of Springs and Northwest Woods as well as Cedar Street, although, in both Southampton and East Hampton towns, power outages were going up in some spots even as others were going down.
“As long as you’re out of power you’re going to be unhappy, and justifiably so,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “I do know that I think it’s imperative that LIPA’s senior management perform an Irene after-action review.”
“I intend to push for a valid and accurate critique with my colleagues at the East End Supervisors and Mayors meeting,” Mayor Rickenbach had said in his statement. “Something has to change in the hierarchy of LIPA management.”
