Last Sunday a number of residents of Hartsdale and Edgemont experienced power outages. On election day many residents experienced similar outages. For some utility customers- this was the second time within days that they experienced power outages. Obviously, with winter approaching, many people were worried. They want to be able to depend on Con Ed to provide them with electricity --and a warm winter!
I asked Con Ed to have their engineering department evaluate what happened. This is their response:
PAUL FEINER
Good morning Paul:
I sent your Hartsdale/Central Ave/Edgemont inquiry to our engineering department. Below is there response.
“The faults on our system over the past 3 years are not wide scale outages (excluding this past week). Average customer outages are 50 customers per event. This is due to our overhead system isolating faults and re-routing power around faulted areas. Anytime a tree comes down or an animal causes an outage, our switches isolate the fault if not clear itself restoring all customers. Or fuses will blow on spurs effecting only a limited amount of customers. Over the past 3 years, we have had about 15 outages due to animals or issues, with some not causing more than a flicker to the customers. Several times we had emergency crews cut the power themselves due to safety issues. We have had one transformer fail and a few transformers which tripped causing an outage to the people fed from it.
Even when our primary feed is taken out, customers only experience a momentary dip in power and within a few seconds our overhead switches operate to restore power automatically.
Also, the way the system works, not all faults will cause an outage. Sometimes when trees touch our lines or animals come into contact a switch will open and close within a second clearing itself keeping everyone in power with only a quick dip in power for about one second.
This past week was slightly different, Sunday we had a fault which took out both feeders to the area causing a wide scale outage. We also had another fault two days later with a switch failing to operate causing another outage. Everything is fully restored and the defective switch will be inspected soon. Having faults on both feeds to a Loop are not typical, but we do have emergency tie points to other feeders to restore customers in these events.
Overall, this loop has been one of the least operated loops I have looked into. Maybe on average 1-2 operations a month, mostly switch operations with no actual sustained outages”.
I hope this answers all of your questions on this issue.
Enjoy your weekend.
Luigi Vingo
Public Affairs Manager
Westchester Public Affairs
From: Paul Feiner [mailto:pfeiner@greenburghny.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2016 8:40 AM
To: Vingo, Luigi
Cc: dl - Westchester RCA
Subject: Re: Edgemont area <External Sender>
Some residents are asking why power keeps going off in Hartsdale/Central Ave/Edgemont. After this is over can Con Ed inspect infrastructure? If you can speak to your team - and if they can devote some time/energy trying to figure out why this keeps happening - people would be most appreciative. I have been receiving non stop calls all morning. paul