Scarsdale Mayor Marc Samwick Calls for Con Edison to Improve Preparedness and Infrastructure

In the wake of the devastation and the lengthy power outage caused by Tropical Storm Isaias, Scarsdale Mayor Marc Samwick testified at a joint hearing of the NYS Legislature on August 20, 2020. Here are his remarks:

Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Heastie, members of the Senate and Assembly, and other attendees. I am here today on behalf of the Scarsdale Village Board of Trustees and every member of the Scarsdale community.

As a community leader, I have experienced a high level of frustration in connection with being virtually powerless in helping our residents, local businesses, our own municipality, and other important members of our community to get their power and internet service restored and return their lives to some semblance of normalcy amidst the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.

I am angered and astonished at Con Ed’s continuing failure to develop, manage, and maintain a resilient electric grid capable of reasonably-paced recovery following a severe weather event and Altice’s inability to restore internet and cable service to all residents more than two weeks after the storm.

These outages are simply beyond the pale. Yet, it seems these outages are becoming the new normal for Westchester County.

Our electric and communication infrastructure must be hardened, able to withstand the impacts of severe weather, and capable of prompt recovery.

I have received emails from and spoken with with so many residents of my Village about struggles of the elderly, those with a wide array of health issues, women and men working from home, and even new parents at home with an 8-day old baby.

Our need for reliable electrical power and the ability to communicate via phone and internet has never been greater. Yet, our critical utility providers have repeatedly shown that they are not up to the task of managing their respective networks.

Going forward, Con Ed and Altice must be prepared when the the next storm comes, and the next one and the one after that. To that end, the Village of Scarsdale drafted a letter to this body for the public record regarding our storm experience with respect to Con Ed’s storm assessment, line clearing and power restoration operations.

I can summarize the major topics and comments as follows:

1. The lack of adequate field supervision and crew coordination caused significant productivity losses that contributed directly to the multi-day power outage.

2. The lack of integration of the initial field damage assessment with the daily work plan restoration assignments resulted in confusion, inefficiencies and massive loss of productivity.

3. Late daily start times for Con Ed crews and the absence of Con Ed tree crews resulted in loss of productivity and the expectation and necessity for Village tree crews to effectively work for Con Ed. Sufficient crews should be in-place in advance of large storm events and should be sustained to provide longer work days amidst such emergency conditions.

4. Excessive delay in receipt of new work assignments resulted in significant downtime, lost productivity and public perception issues.

5. As the first company on-site, Con Ed should share their observations with the cable, phone and Internet providers. This level of coordination is all the more important in the current COVID-19 context, where much greater emphasis is placed on Internet connectivity for education, business, and providing access to goods and services necessary to our residents.

6. We need a coordinated restoration effort between ConEd and local officials.

7. ConEd does not treat municipalities as their partner in addressing outages.The ConEd municipal liaison should have timely and accurate information, the ability to direct local redeployment, and more active incident management capabilities.

8. Daily Con Ed telephone briefings were inefficient, time consuming and unproductive.

9. ConEd’s outage and restoration information was inaccessible, incomplete, unreliable, and sometimes incorrect. Further, ConEd personnel endeavored to shift responsibility for certain failures to local municipal personnel.

10. Smart meters and smart infrastructure are designed to provide customer-facing benefits, including minimizing outages and helping to identify outage locations when they occur. ConEd must provide clear public communication of the benefits of smart infrastructure with actionable milestones to which it will be accountable for implementing smart technology.

11. The Annual Electric Reliability Performance Report does not analyze Westchester County separate from NYC and Long Island. Con Ed must include discrete performance metric reporting for Westchester County to enable us to quantitatively assess Con Ed’s performance.

12. Downed trees continue to be a problem in the wake of storms of varying strengths. Con Ed should be required to present its future tree trimming programming schedule and to be held accountable to meeting these schedules.

In conclusion, thank you for working on behalf of the Village of Scarsdale and Westchester County to conduct a public hearing on Con Ed’s and Altice’s inadequate responses to the remnants of this tropical storm, one focused on developing lasting improvements in their infrastructure and operations to shield communities from the adverse impacts of extended power and internet outages in the future.