With roughly 15,000 Orange County residents still without power, County Executive Edward Diana has called on the State Public Service Commission to review local utility companies’ performance in response to damage and outages left by the storm.
“It is simply unacceptable that so many Orange County residents remain without power this long after the storm,” Diana said. “The outages threaten the life and safety of our residents, especially our sick and elderly. Many students in the county also remain out of school for the entire week due to the ongoing power outages.”
While Diana commended the work of local utility crews and counterparts from across the nation, he said the “overall corporate reaction from these companies that oversee our local utilities has been severely lacking.”
In light of the anticipated storm expected later this week, “we must know that the utility companies are able to respond appropriately and efficiently in our time of need,” the county executive said.
He urged the PSC “to review the performance of the local utility companies to ensure that they are capable of handling storms of the magnitude we experienced with Sandy.”
