POWER STRUGGLE
Had no electricity for nearly 14 hours
A Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. crew works Wednesday at the company’s Frog Alley substation in Uptown Kingston. A lightning strike about 1 p.m. Tuesday damaged the transformer at the site, causing more than 4,000 of the utility’s customers in Kingston to lose power. Many had their electricity back within three hours, but the Uptown business district, which is full of shops and restaurants, remained in the dark until about 3 a.m. Wednesday. See story,
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Most Central Hudson customers in the Uptown Kingston business district had their electricity restored by 3 a.m. Wednesday, after nearly 14 hours in the dark, and most restaurants and businesses were up and running by midday.
But some damage had been done.
On North Front Street, a sign on the door at Deising’s Bakery said the business was closed for the day; that only its Midtown shop, on Broadway, was open.
Peter Deising said he was notified at 3 a.m. that power was back on and that he immediately went to the business to make sure the freezers were up and running. Deising said the freezer doors had remained closed, and “luckily everything stayed cold enough.”
Still, he said, the business wasn’t able to resume baking on schedule, so only the Midtown shop opened, and it sold leftovers and “ran a big sale.” He said anyone with cake orders was notified and told to pick up them up at the Broadway location.
At the Kingston Candy Bar on Wall Street, clerk Olivia Reeder said the business lost 16 buckets of ice cream and all of its soft serve after the power went off about 1 p.m. Tuesday during a severe thunderstorm. Reeder, daughter of shop owner Diane Reeder, said the business gave away quickly melting ice cream to friends and customers Tuesday evening.
The store was open for business Wednesday, and she said they a delivery of ice cream was expected.
At the Market Basket Delicatessen on Wall Street, owner Colleen Schuon said she was grateful to Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. for fixing the outage. She said the deli only lost a few items due to spoilage.
Schuon used two Army coolers filled with ice, and she said her walk-in cooler keeps food cold for up to 15 hours.
“God Bless Central Hudson ... they did a wonderful job,” Schuon said. “Did you see that?” she added, referring to the flames and the column of black smoke that rose from Central Hudson’s Frog Alley substation Tuesday afternoon after lightning hit the transformer there.
Powerful thunderstorms and lightning strikes were to blame for about 15,000 outages in Central Hudson’s service area Tuesday afternoon, the utility said. More than 4,000 of the outages were in Kingston, due largely to the lightning strike on Frog Alley.
Central Hudson spokesman John Maserjian said the utility was able to reroute power that normally passes through the Frog Alley substation.
Maserjian said the damage at that site was “fairly complex” and that “repair efforts were fairly complicated as well.”
Repairs at the Frog Alley site began after the weather passed Tuesday, and they continued Wednesday. Maserjian said “a replacement transformer will be installed over the next several weeks”.
“It was a very damaging storm,” he said. “We were fortunate the damage was centered or isolated in a smaller area than past storms.”
On May 15, severe storms killed two people in the MidHudson Valley, caused tens of thousands of power outages spawned at least three tornadoes, including one that formed in Saugerties.