'We saw utilities fail': NY Legislature to hold hearing on Isaias response, outages

The New York state Legislature will hold a joint legislative hearing to examine what its leaders call "the response failures of various utility companies" in the aftermath of Isaias.

News 12 Staff

Aug 9, 2020, 4:03 PM

Updated 1,584 days ago

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The New York state Legislature will hold a joint legislative hearing to examine what its leaders call "the response failures of various utility companies" in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaias.
The storm cut power to hundreds of thousands of people across the state, and tens of thousands of outages persisted on Sunday on Long Island, in the city and in Westchester -- days after the storm struck.
In a press release issued Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said the upcoming legislative hearing "will evaluate the utilities’ preparation and response to the storm outages and related issues."
“Across the state, we saw utilities fail and people lose power,” Stewart-Cousins said in a statement. “Today, we still have thousands and thousands of people waiting for their power to be restored with no clear end in sight. This is unacceptable. The joint legislative hearing will get to the bottom of what went wrong, why the response was so slow, and what can be done to improve responses going forward.”
“Tropical Storm Isaias left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers without power," Heastie was quoted as saying in the release. "Several days have passed and utility companies still have not fully restored power. This is unacceptable. We need to examine what happened and identify ways that we can be better prepared in the future.”
The press release said that the joint legislative hearing will examine the emergency storm response for utilities following Tropical Storm Isaias, with a focus on the Long Island, Westchester, and New York City regions, where the vast majority of outages in the state occurred. It said the hearing will be streamed live on the Senate and Assembly websites, but a date for the hearing wasn't immediately provided.
As the outages linger into a new week, it's expected to heat up while people without power deal with a lack of air condition and refrigeration. Temperatures were expected to climb into the 90s in parts of the tri-state area this week.
YOUR PHOTOS: Tropical Storm Isaias 
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