Hurricane Sandy Utility Outages May Be Worsened By Underinvestment, Lack Of Planning
Posted in: Today's ChiliNEW YORK — Two days after Hurricane Sandy walloped the East Coast, electrical utility companies warned hundreds of thousands of customers from Long Island to New Jersey that they may be left in the dark for more than 10 days.
Critics said cost-cutting was holding back recovery efforts, and long-term planning around climate change and extreme weather is lacking. The the industry pointed to downed trees, knocked-out facilities and the devastating reach of the storm to explain the duration of outages.
“You cannot make infrastructure hurricane-proof. We had a nine-foot storm surge on top of high tide. You cannot protect your infrastructure against that sort of damage,” said Chris Eck, spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light, which had 940,000 customers without power Wednesday.
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