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To restore service faster after those storms, crews made emergency repairs all across Westchester County, Con Edison representatives said. The emergency repairs were temporary, however, and cannot withstand possible further damage during the winter, Con Edison officials said Tuesday.
Thousands of residents in Briarcliff Manor and Ossining were without power for days after Sandy, but the new repairs would mean much shorter and smaller outages in the next few weeks, Con Edison officials said.
“These permanent repairs will be like changing a battery on a car,” said Chris Olert, a Con Edison spokesman. “You take off one terminal and it knocks out a system for a little while and you put it back and power is restored. So people shouldn't be without power for more than a couple of hours at most.”
Olert said the new repairs would be permanent. “The object during Sandy was to get everybody’s electricity restored. And in order to do that, in some neighborhoods and areas we had to put in shunts,” Olert said. Shunts are devices that allow workers to connect severed wires quickly. “Those are temporary, though, and they’re not doing much but connecting wires that were broken. So, crews need to go in and reconnect those lines permanently.”
Mayor William Hanauer said he hopes the work won't last longer than a week.
“Con Edison has let us know that they're doing permanent repair work on the main electric feed to the village,” Hanauer said Tuesday during a town board meeting. "These repairs are going to take about a week to complete. You may experience some outages, but this is not the same thing we went through a month ago. Power will come back on."
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