The president of the Troy City Council is making an appeal to National Grid on behalf of some local businesses that lost power over the weekend. A major power outage hit Lansingburgh on Saturday.
"It was a squirrel who caused this chaos," said Troy City Council President Carmella Mantello, a Republican running for mayor, who says a handful of small businesses were subjected to an on-and-off 12-hours in the dark that affected them financially, particularly eateries still recovering from the COVID pandemic.
Mantello contacted National Grid, asking the utility if there's anything it can do to fully or partially reimburse the businesses that took a hit.
"I emailed Grid, some of their top management," Mantello said. "And I basically said, ‘listen, if there's any type of grant program, I mean, we all know that they, you know, when Mother Nature hits the state, somehow finds some money to help small businesses sometimes.’ And so saying that, you know, I sent this email to Grid, and what I am hoping, I think,to get an email back, basically saying that they could file a complaint with the Public Service Commission. And you know, that there's nothing that they can directly do, but at the same time, we all know that grid has been really good community partners.”
Ed Doin owns 41 Sports Bar and Grill. He says the establishment had booked a retirement party for that evening. Employees showed up and began preparations as Doin monitored National Grid’s website. He says the electricity would come back on for a few minutes then go out again, as the estimate of restoration time kept moving later and later in the day, the power outage eventually cost his business over $6,000.
“We iced a lot of things down, we lost some products, some perishable items that we had for the party, like vegetable platters and fruit trays and things of that nature, you know, which is a substantial amount of stuff for 100 plus people. That stuff just couldn't be salvaged. Because this party was to happen on Saturday, we're closed on Sunday and Monday. So we really couldn't reuse the stuff that we lost,” said Doin.
With the party canceled, Doin sent staffers to deliver the food to a nearby shelter. National Grid's Patrick Stella concedes it was a fairly long outage.
“We had our crews out there and did take took some time for all of those customers to come back," Stella said. "So we certainly sympathize with that. We do have a claims process for customers who would like to file a claim for loss of any type of perishables, they may have, or money as far as revenue goes for small businesses and things like that, and we certainly allow customers to go ahead and file a claim for those kinds of losses.”
Mantello would like to see National Grid develop some sort of community partnership program that could assist businesses impacted by power outages
"Maybe something, if they don't directly compensate small business, maybe they'll start a grant program, you know, for 'mother nature type' incidents like this. So, you know, it really goes back to, you know, ‘listen, we're all in this together, and we're all partners’ and I guess, but their business at the same time, they also need to recognize that these small businesses took a really hard hit,” Mantello said.
