Some Rockland Electric Customers To Get Power Wednesday, Schools Closed

Roughly 1,400 of the 2,150 Rockland Electric customers in Wyckoff who remain without power could see it restored Wednesday, but the rest may have to wait another week, according to authorities, who also said Wykoff schools will be closed at least on Monday and Tuesday, with a decision on the rest of the week coming Tuesday.

“We’re constantly pressing the utilities; we’re constantly trying to figure out what’s going on,” Wyckoff Police Chief Benjamin Fox told Patch. “This is a storm that they’ve never dealt with before. That’s the magnitude of the damage to their system.”

He added that Sandy “has essentially destroyed their complete infrastructure.”

Rockland Electric customers get their power primarily from a distribution line that comes out of Allendale, and that line was “severely damaged,” Fox said, adding that the company is working to rebuild the entire transmission line.

That means the earliest Rockland Electric customers will have their power restored is Wednesday.

“On Wednesday they anticipate bringing back about 1,400 of the 2,150 people that are out,” Fox said. “The remaining customers will come on sometime between Wednesday and, they hope, Sunday, Nov. 11.”

Fox said the company could not provide any information as to which customers would be restored Wednesday and who would have to wait longer.

He also cautioned residents not to be misled by the many Orange and Rockland trucks they are likely to see in town in the coming days putting up poles, lifting wires, making other repairs and then leaving, saying that while it might look like everything is back to normal, customers still won’t have power because the company is still rebuilding the primary transmission line.

Fox said officials are also working with PSE&G to get a “more definitive timeframe” for power restoration for those customers and to determine whether there is something specifically preventing power from coming into Wyckoff, but that right now, officials are still telling PSE&G customers to anticipate about another week without.

“We will probably see restorations periodically over the course of the next week,” Fox said. “What I simply can’t get out of Public Service yet is whether there is something that’s preventing power from coming into Wyckoff that they can be more defining of.”

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