A crew of Entegrus staff is back in New York City helping restore power for customers as the city faces its fourth nor’easter storm of the month.
The latest storm began in the city Tuesday night and is expected to drop 12-15 inches of heavy, wet snow by the time it's over.
Entegrus President and CEO Jim Hogan says a crew of 12 staff from both the Chatham-Kent and Strathroy offices, as well as four power line maintainers from Bluewater Power, were expected to arrive in New York Wednesday evening and start work Thursday morning.
"As an industry, we do work together, whether you're in Ontario, New York, or Florida. It's a common practice," says Hogan. "We do have emergency agreements with other regions because you just never know when you have the need. We all work together in many jurisdictions to help each other out."
Entegrus and Bluewater Power staff were in Rye, New York earlier this month helping New York City's energy company Con Edison with their restoration efforts and returned on March 13.
"I'm glad that once again we're partnering with one of our local utilities Bluewater Power [with] some of their crew joining our crew and integrating opportunity for the Ontario utilities to work together and help out our neighbouring utilities and neighbouring customers," says Hogan.
He says there are so many linesmen and tradespeople that are helping with the restoration efforts.
"It's a real challenge. There's a lot of coordination between a lot of people, but the crew they're very qualified. They like the challenge," says Hogan. "There's also the feedback they get from the customers knowing it's cold and the power has been out and they get to turn the power on. It's very rewarding and very gratifying."
It is reported that the last two major storms resulted in about 200,000 customer outages.
"The feedback we're getting from Con Edison is that it's a very similar storm as the last one," says Hogan. "There's gonna be significant customers out, a lot of downed wires, and heavy thick snow on the wires causing a significant challenge."
Hogan says the trip could be anywhere from three to ten days, depending on what the weather is like in New York and how many other crews are helping.
