STORM LEAVES A BIT OF A MESS
Power outages, downed lines cause headaches across region
CAPITAL REGION, N.Y. » Many residents across the Capital Region woke up Monday morning without power after a heavy-wind rain storm knocked out some power lines.
According to Sean Ward, executive assistant to Green Island Village Mayor Ellen McNulty-Ryan, residents in the village lost power at approximately 3:30 a.m. Ward said the Green Island Union Free School District operated on a twohour delay Monday morning since officials weren’t sure how long it would take to restore power in the village.
Ward said that power was restored shortly after 7 a.m. by the Green Island Power Authority.
“There was a tree that fell on a critical line in the south-end of the island,” Ward said. “The Green Island Power Authority responded immediately, they traced it back to a location in the south-end of the village and worked very quickly to rebuild the line and remediate the issue.”
Ward said that officials in the village also seen other tree branches down and a lot of debris from the high winds, but said he had not heard of any property damage throughout the village as of Monday morning.
Meanwhile, some residents living in Cohoes may have also woken up to having no power Monday morning. Mayor Shawn Morse said he believes the power went out in some neighborhoods such as Western Avenue, Grandview Ave-
nue and Columbia Street around 2:30 a.m.
“We lost power in mostly like the hill section,” Morse said. “We had a tree fall actually on my street.”
Morse said that a tree fell and crossed over the power line and pulled the wires down.
“That blocked the street; there are four to five houses that couldn’t get down the street because of it,” Morse said.
As of around 10 a.m. Monday morning Morse said that National Grid was still working to restore power on certain streets such as Grandview Avenue.
“We’ve seen a majority of our [Cohoes Proud] flags on the bridges got blown away,” Morse said. “I got a couple emails that trees also fell on fences and stuff like that, but nobody has called me yet to say that they’ve had any major structural damage. I think overall we escaped pretty luckily just to have some of these minor issues.”
According to Watervliet Mayor Michael Manning Monday morning, city residents did not have to wake up to any power outages or severe damage from the storm. Manning said city officials were still accessing the storm damage as of around 10 a.m. Monday.
According to National Grid, more than 2,000 homes were without power as of 8 a.m. in Rensselaer County. National Grid’s website said, early Monday afternoon, that 515 active outages left more than 13,700 people without power in an area stretching from the Canadian border to below Albany and west of Syracuse.