LEADERSHIP FAILURE AT LONG ISLAND POWER

Sophonie Sylvain, with her daughters, right, was turned away when she tried to complain in person at an office in Hicksville, N.Y.

The head of Long Island Power Authority resigned on Tuesday after a group of customers filed a class-action lawsuit accusing LIPA of being “grossly negligent” in its response to Hurricane Sandy, which left 945,000 of its customers without power. An estimated 45,000 are still without power in the area. LIPA chief Michael Hervey’s resignation comes as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the formation of a commission to investigate how prepared power companies were for the storm.

Read it at Newsday

November 14, 2012 7:21 AM

NYT 11/14/12
By DANNY HAKIM, PATRICK McGEEHAN and MICHAEL MOSS

It was four days before Hurricane Sandy would arrive, and trustees of the Long Island Power Authority gathered as forecasters’ warnings grew dire. For more than two hours, the trustees talked about a range of issues, including a proposal to hire a branding consultant.

But discussion of the storm lasted just 39 seconds.

 

The trustees’ approach toward the looming disaster reflects deep-rooted problems at the authority that have hobbled its response, causing hardship for hundreds of thousands of its customers, according to an examination of its performance by The New York Times. The bungling of the storm has called into question the authority’s very future.

 

The examination by The Times shows that the Long Island Power Authority has repeatedly failed to plan for extreme weather, despite extensive warnings by government investigators and outside monitors. In fact, before Hurricane Sandy, the authority was significantly behind on perhaps the most basic step to prepare for storms — trimming trees that can bring down power lines.

 

Customers have been exasperated not only by a lack of power, but also by the authority’s inability to communicate basic information. Long Islanders have recounted tales of phones unanswered at authority offices, of wildly inaccurate service maps and of broken promises to dispatch repair crews.

Of course, the storm was highly unusual, and utilities across the Northeast have come under criticism for delays in restoring power. The authority said it was “on plan” to restore power.

Still, the recovery has been slowest on Long Island, where roughly 90 percent of the authority’s 1.1 million customers lost power. As of Tuesday, more than 10,000 customers were still in the dark.

 

“Resources came late,” said Frank P. Petrone, chief executive of the Town of Huntington and a former official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “When they came, there was no management to utilize those resources effectively. And it took 10 days for them to get their act together.”

 

Senior officials, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, have excoriated the authority, but in the past, they have paid little attention to its management.

The authority has not had a permanent chief executive for two years. Five spots on the 15-member board are vacant, 3 of which are Mr. Cuomo’s to fill.

The authority’s chairman, Howard E. Steinberg, has stayed on past an expired term. He was originally appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki, who left office almost six years ago.

Trying to fend off attacks on his oversight of the Long Island Power Authority, Mr. Cuomo on Tuesday established a high-level panel, called a Moreland Commission, to investigate how utilities across New York, including the authority, handled Hurricane Sandy and other storms.

He also revived a proposal that he made in his 2010 campaign to combine the authority with other state energy agencies, but has not ruled out privatizing the authority.

“I don’t believe you can fix it,” he said. “I believe it has to be overhauled and you need a new system.”

 

Also on Tuesday, the authority’s acting chief executive, Michael D. Hervey, announced his resignation effective at the end of the year.

The authority’s chairman, Mr. Steinberg, said the trustees spent only 39 seconds discussing the storm at the meeting because the board was confident that a plan was in place. He noted that the trustees were not utility professionals, but rather “an oversight board of citizens.”

“At that point, a few days before, there is nothing the board can do one way or another,” he said.

In many ways, the Long Island Power Authority, known as LIPA, reflects the shortcomings of the state’s quasi-independent public authorities, which are often criticized as a shadow government that resists scrutiny. Long Island is the only region of New York where the main electrical utility is run by the government.

 

While oversight has drifted, politicians have installed relatives and friends in executive positions at the authority, turning it into a rich source of patronage jobs, according to interviews and a review of state records.

These positions have an average salary of $110,000, the records show.

“There are many, many people who have been placed at LIPA during my tenure here who have no utility experience or training in the job that they have been placed in,” said Tracy Burgess-Levy, the authority’s director of community relations.

 

In an interview last week, before he stepped down, Mr. Hervey defended the authority and indicated that he believed some customers had unrealistic expectations.

“We are on plan,” he said. “We cannot tell each of our 1.1 million customers exactly what is happening with their service. You can tell them generalities. So we cannot fully supply that information needed for individual customers.

“But I think, all said, when we look around at neighboring utilities, and the damage that we had, we are progressing very well.”

 

The interview took place at an office in Hicksville, where the scene was tense. A stream of frustrated customers knocked on doors, pleading for information and shouting at security guards, who turned them away.

“We haven’t had power since it happened,” Sophonie Sylvain, 30, a nursing home worker from Amityville, told the guards, her two young daughters and baby in tow. “Every day I call,” she said, adding that she always received the same response. “It will be on tomorrow.”

Cold, Dark and Damp, Pockets of Misery Persist 2 Weeks Later

Lines for the distribution of food and clothing remained long in Coney Island, Brooklyn, on Monday. Hurricane Sandy has upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard.

NY Times  MICHAEL WILSON Published: November 12, 2012

In Coney Island, a 67-year-old man sleeps with plastic bottles from the bodega, filled with hot water, tucked in his armpits. Toilets unflushed by modern means for a fortnight have created a stench in the Rockaways that is so bad that one man keeps incense burning in his apartment day and night.

On Staten Island, people sit in “warming buses,” cozy and, like time itself these days, going nowhere. In a town in New Jersey where wells do not pump because the power is out, residents collect rainwater in empty jars. In Long Beach, on Long Island, a couple bicycles through the autumn chill to the charging station at City Hall to keep their cellphones powered.

Two weeks. Monday was the 14th day since Hurricane Sandy upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard, the longest two weeks of many people’s lives. Plastic bottles. Warming buses. Charging stations. These are just a few of the signposts in a changed world. Help is coming, the people are told, but some have lost the desire to trust.

“I don’t believe,” said Lioudmila Korableva, 71, a resident of a darkened Coney Island building project filled with older people.

“In the wall goes water,” she said, describing the humid conditions with her Russian accent. There is just too much moisture in the air. “The blanket is wet.”

Power companies in New York and New Jersey worked on Monday to free these remaining communities from the stubborn blackout. There was progress, with housing projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways flickering to life on Saturday and Sunday. There was light, if not heat. Families that had warmed their apartments with stovetop burners could now use the electric oven, with its door wide open. A woman used the burner for its intended purpose on Monday morning, handing her granddaughter a pancake on a paper plate.

New Jersey announced an end to gas rationing. Long Island Rail Road service returned to nearly prestorm timetables. Progress was everywhere, it seemed, but for the man getting his news from a radio with batteries, not here.

“I talk to God,” said Mark Kremer, the Coney Island man whose bedtime routine includes the hot water bottles. “What I did, to suffer like this?”

A former home health attendant, he climbs from his second-floor apartment up the pitch black stairs to the 12th floor, to check on his friend Asya Kaplan, 82, who fell in the hall a few days ago and opened up a gash at her hairline.

In the Ocean Village Apartments at the Shore in the Rockaways, there now exists a dividing line at the 10th floor. Below, there is running water. Above, none. A resident on the 14th floor, Lola Idowu, straps on her miner’s helmet with its flashlight and treks down to 10 for buckets of water, four times a day. The older residents have stopped flushing their toilets, neighbors said, and they gather in the lobby, bringing their apartments’ odors with them.

Only small children have accepted this new life in the Rockaways without complaint. Very small: Jayleb, a boy now one month old, has lived half his life this way. He sleeps in a duffel coat, inside a baby blanket that is under two quilts. “To even change his Pampers is an ordeal,” his mother, Tonya Ranero, 35, said.

In Long Beach on Long Island, a mother, Evelyn Hogarth, 32, frightened by the conditions in a shelter, returned home with her three children and ailing mother. “There are roaches everywhere,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Nearby, Michael Hardy and Denaya Hardy, both 38, celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary in the dark, between trips to the basement to fill a bucket with floodwater, to flush the toilets.

“We celebrated by eating rations and drinking water,” Mr. Hardy said.

Elsewhere in Long Beach, as he spoke, the National Guard handed out water at a shopping center. People brought dead cellphones to a charging station at City Hall, near the portable toilets. In the Silverton section of Toms River, N.J., the surge and the wind knocked out the 10-foot windows from Wayne Whitall’s home. His pool table had become a floating battering ram, knocking through a wall and landing in a yard. The boat was across the street, where he was trying to free it from debris on Monday.

In Seaside Heights after two weeks, a first: residents were allowed to visit stricken parts of the town for a few hours on Monday morning.

Wayne Cimorelli, an owner of Coin Castle Amusements and two restaurants in a three-story building on the Boardwalk, said his expectations had been raised when he saw a picture of the area before he returned. Then he entered his 21,000-square-foot basement and found six feet of sand and debris. Equipment was ruined. A $14,000 ice machine lay on its side.

“This is the nightmare that doesn’t want to end,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more disgusting it gets. I would imagine we are up against maggots and whatnot.”

A mile north, Danielle Feigenbaum, 49, sat outside the house her grandfather had built 60 years ago, the scene of countless Thanksgivings and celebrations. Now the house carried a bright orange sticker on the door. Condemned. “It’s just devastating to think that my mother grew up here, I grew up here, my daughter grew up here, but her kids won’t,” she said, yet tried to sound hopeful. “Well, we just don’t know.”

In the township of Tewksbury, N.J., with its 12-acre lots, stone walls, horses and wells, the notion of suffering is relative. But it is present.

Jon and Angela Holt, partners in both marriage and a small public relations firm, cannot pump water from their well until power is restored, a service traditionally late in arriving to the area. They collect rainwater from the downspout in empty kitty-litter jugs for the toilet. The world around them showers, and they do not, so they canceled a meeting on Monday, aware of their appearance.

They felt lucky compared with others facing so much destruction, but now, after two weeks, they find it difficult to explain how they remain in the dark.

“It is a struggle, whether you’re of means or poor,” Mr. Holt said.

Hours later, his power was returned.

A mile or two away, on Burrell Road, John and Tracy Rosendahl arranged to leave their powerless home to stay at yet another motel room. One of their young sons was urinating against the house Monday afternoon, as he had been instructed to do in the absence of a working toilet.

“They’re turning feral,” Mr. Rosendahl said.

In Coney Island, in the building for older tenants, a surprise: the lights snapped on at 1:08 p.m., according to Mr. Kremer’s clock. Just as quickly, the man who had asked God why he was being punished went from aggrieved to compassionate. “It says on TV not everybody has power,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”

Then, after Mr. Kremer had spent three hours and one minute in the new world, the power went out again. Aggrieved once more: “Now I have to take everything from refrigerator again, put again near my window.”

Another resident in the building, Angelita Torres, 72, paused on her journey from the 14th floor, which took the better part of an hour because of her weak heart. Asked how she was doing, her face lit up like the flashlight her home attendant carried beside her.

“I feel good,” she said. “Thank you, God.” She paused, and added, still smiling, “I’m freezing.”

Reporting was contributed by Ruth Bashinsky, Russ Buettner, Stephen Farrell, David M. Halbfinger and Sarah Maslin Nir.

A TALE OF THREE CITIES

Nine days after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast, the governors of New York and New Jersey are warning residents that the recovery will be long—especially in coastal areas where thousands of homes were destroyed. Power hasn’t yet returned to certain areas of the states, and New Yorkers are dealing with gasoline rationing for the first time in decades. At least 120 people in the U.S. were killed by the storm, which has caused an estimated $50 billion in damages and economic loss. “This is our Katrina,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

It’s a tale of two cities.  Con Edison, which supplies power to the city and Westchester County, said on Saturday that 98 percent of homes that lost power during Hurricane Sandy and the more recent nor'easter have their lights back on. But that means about 20,000 customers are still waiting. The 98 percent figure also does not include the 35,000 in Staten Island, Brooklyn, or Queens whose homes are damaged to the point of not being able to accept power right now. On Long Island, LIPA is struggling to restore power for about 160,000 of their customers, still without power 10 days after Sandy.
As New York deals with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, life has returned to normal for many of her victims—but not those victims in the poorest parts of the city. Communities along the southern shores of Brooklyn and Queens still don’t have power or heat and are desperate for supplies. Local residents are picking up the slack, organizing volunteers and collecting donations for those in need. But compounding the problem is that so many people don’t even know what government agencies are supposed to be helping—mainly because there were so few people on the ground.




It’s finally over. Florida declared President Obama has won the state’s 29 electoral votes, giving the president 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. In the end, Obama captured 50 percent of the state, with Romney taking 49.3 percent—giving Obama a 74,000-vote lead.

Florida will take a closer look at how it holds elections, especially in counties where people had to wait for more than four hours to cast a ballot, Gov. Rick Scott announced. The Sunshine State saw 8.5 million residents cast a ballot this year, up from 8.3 million in 2008. The increase came despite the fact that state officials cut early voting down from two weeks to eight days. Earlier this year, Scott stirred up controversy when he directed local elections boards to remove people they deemed ineligible from the voting rolls.

FRACTURED RECOV:MANH IMPROVES BUT STATEN IS, LONG IS, JERS LACK BASIC NEEDS

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was flooded. The waters surrounding New York City have been rising an inch a decade, and the pace is picking up.

The patchy recovery from Hurricane Sandy exposed a fractured region on Saturday. The lights flickered on in Manhattan neighborhoods that had been dark for days, and New York’s subways rumbled and screeched through East River tunnels again.

But in shorefront stretches of Staten Island and Queens that were all but demolished, and in broad sections of New Jersey and Long Island, gasoline was still almost impossible to come by, electricity was still lacking, temperatures were dropping and worried homeowners wondered when help would finally arrive.

Mr. Bloomberg visited the devastated neighborhoods in the Rockaway section of Queens, where he voiced concern about chilly temperatures and hypothermia. “It’s cold, and it really is critical that people stay warm, especially the elderly,” he said at a City Hall briefing, urging people to go to shelters if they did not have heat. He added, “We are committed to making sure that everybody can have a roof over their head and food in their stomachs and deal with the cold safely.”

 

In many places that the storm pounded in its relentless push into the Northeast, there was a profound sense of isolation, with whole towns on Long Island still cut off from basic information, supplies and electricity. People in washed-out neighborhoods said they felt increasingly desperate.

Drivers in New Jersey faced 1970s-style gasoline rationing imposed by Gov. Chris Christie. He said that he could not estimate how long New Jersey’s gas rationing system would have to remain in place, adding that the biggest problem for the state’s gas stations was power even more than supply at this point.

The No. 4, 5, 6 and 7 train lines were restored to full service as of Saturday morning, state officials said. 

Gas-station shortages may take several days to be fully resolved, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a briefing Saturday.

ANGER AFTER DESPERATION, COLD AND DARKNESS.

Emotions, frayed after almost a week of desperation, darkness and cold, approached a breaking point on Friday as the collective spirit that buoyed New York in the first few days after Hurricane Sandy gave way to angry complaints of neglect and unequal treatment. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, facing criticism that he was favoring marathon runners arriving from around the world over people in devastated neighborhoods, reversed himself and canceled the New York City Marathon.

 Patience also wore thin in other parts of the New York area amid lines that were once again painfully long — lines for free meals, lines for buses to take people where crippled subways could not, lines for gasoline that stretched 30 blocks in Brooklyn.


In Lower Manhattan, the power restoration started around 5 p.m. in the East Village. The network in the East Village, known as Cooper Square, serves about 67,000 customers between 14th and Canal Streets. The Chelsea neighborhood sparked to life about 45 minutes later, bringing back power to an additional 25,000 customers between 14th and 31st Streets on the West Side.
The next big network came back to life around 7:30 p.m., when 30,000 customers east of Fifth Avenue between 14th and 31st Streets were once again able to turn their lights on.

The return of power to apartment buildings in New York was greeted with cheers in many parts of the city, according to multiple reports from witnesses on social networks.

In other boroughs and in the suburbs, the prognosis for full restoration was grimmer. In many parts of the region, utility companies forecast that people might be without power until the middle of November. On Long Island, more than 500,000 customers of the Long Island Power Authority still had no power on Friday evening, or any estimate of when it would return.

Broad Channel, Queens. Patience wore thin as the region struggled.

The American Red Cross struggled on Friday to reassure beleaguered New York City residents that its disaster-relief efforts were at last getting up to speed, after the agency’s delayed arrival in devastated areas of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens drew intense criticism.

As of Friday, the Red Cross said, 25 of its emergency response vehicles — retrofitted ambulances each carrying 2,000 pounds of water, meals and snacks — had begun making their way through the hardest hit parts of the five boroughs. More were on the way, the agency promised.

The Red Cross had not yet opened the three temporary mobile kitchens that it announced on Thursday would be set up on Staten Island, in Riis Park in the Rockaways, and at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, the agency confirmed. The kitchens, which can produce 10,000 meals a day, would begin operating by Saturday, it said.

 

The bodies of two more storm victims were found on Staten Island.

They brought to seven the number of bodies found in Midland Beach, a low-lying area of bungalows and newer two-story houses that was hit by the surge that accompanied Hurricane Sandy on Monday.On Staten Island, which even in good times is often referred to as the city’s forgotten borough, desperation and anger were especially intense.



New Yorkers faced long lines for food handouts on Friday.

Broad Channel, Queens. Patience wore thin as the region struggled.

The bodies of two more storm victims were found on Staten Island.

Most of New York City's more than 40 deaths were in that borough.

Charles Dado removed furniture from his home in Lindenhurst, N.Y.

A man rode his bike through the Rockaway area.

 

 

 

 Across the city, New Yorkers who had found each other through Facebook and Twitter, churches and community groups, City Hall and local elected officials, tried in ways small and large to ease the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy. Several volunteers said the relief provided by their small-scale community efforts was the first to arrive in some of the most hard-hit parts of the city, outpacing large organizations like the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

 

 

A government survey has found that roughly two-thirds of the gasoline stations in the New York metropolitan region do not have fuel to sell.

With gas lines stretching for hours, frustrated commuters often searching for open stations in vain and little reliable information about where gas can be found, the U.S. Energy Information Administration began conducting a survey of supply conditions on Friday.

Its first report was not good.

 

 

Perhaps more so than in any other place in the city, the loss of power for people living in public housing projects forced a return to a primal existence. Opened fire hydrants became community wells. Sleep-and-wake cycles were timed to sunsets and sunrises. People huddled for warmth around lighted gas stoves as if they were roaring fires. Darkness became menacing, a thing to be feared.

 

 

Students at 65 “severely damaged” public schools will be temporarily reassigned to new schools, and will resume classes on Wednesday, Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, announced late Friday afternoon.

The rest of the city’s schoolchildren will return to class Monday,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



THE LONG ROAD BACK: STATEN IS. DEVASTATED, GAS SHORTAGE AND POWER OUTAGE CONTINUE

Four days after Hurricane Sandy, the effort to secure enough gas for the region moved to the forefront of recovery work. In New York, the Taxi Commission warned of a thinner fleet.

Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA, provided a picture of the gasoline shortage in the metropolitan region.
Long Island: 30 percent to 35 percent of 1,000 stations are open.
New York City: 35 percent to 40 percent of 800 stations are open.
New Jersey: 35 percent to 40 percent of 3,000 stations are open.
New York State: 75 percent of 5,250 stations are open.




With traffic somewhat improved from yesterday but some of the high-occupancy-vehicle checkpoints at Manhattan’s entrances doubling as chokepoints, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg lifted the three-occupant limit for taxis and livery cars coming in around 8:15 a.m.

By 9:30 a.m., the lines outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for free shuttle buses into Manhattan were so long that city Transportation Department workers were reported to be flagging down Manhattan-bound motorists and asking them to pick up passengers from the overflow.


With subway trains still unable to get over or under the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan because of flooding and power problems, service between the two boroughs is by shuttle bus, with departures from the transportation hub at the Barclays Center and from Hewes Street on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn.



Some New Yorkers whose homes lost electricity may have to wait more than two weeks to get it back — especially if their homes are the only ones on the block that lost power during the storm, utility officials said Thursday. the 220,000 customers in Manhattan who lost power after the East River swamped a Con Edison power plant at the east end of 14th Street should have power again by Saturday.

The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.

At the boundary, around 40th Street on the East Side, an unusual makeshift community has sprung up, one where the basic building blocks of a New York neighborhood — a pizza place, an unremarkable deli, a bank — have become an oasis.

 

Wednesday evening and into the night, the people from downtown emerged from the cold, enveloping darkness by the hundreds, some with flashlights, some with towels just in case they found a place to shower, some with gallon containers to fill with water to flush the toilet. They stepped into the bright Midtown at East 39th Street at the place where the blackout ends.

As drivers and pedestrians waited in lines 100 cars deep to fill their tanks and many stations ran out, there were whiffs of desperation mixed with gasoline fumes

The soggy marshes and still-damp ruins of homes on Staten Island [photo below] yielded a grim postscript to the toll from Hurricane Sandy on Thursday, as search teams discovered more bodies where the storm’s giant wall of water had smashed its way through. It became apparent that Staten Island would be the city’s tragic epicenter of casualties: 19 of the city's 40 victims have been found here.





Floodwaters rose to about four feet inside the Fairway supermarket in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It is expected to be months for it can re-open.


As parts of the city edged toward some semblance of normal on Thursday, tens of thousands of people who depend on essential home medical care remained tenuously connected to lifesaving services by agencies like Partners in Care, an affiliate of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
At the Visiting Nurse Service of New York alone, more than 5,000 nurses, aides, social workers and others were out serving patients around the city during and after the storm