Thousands Still Without Power

After Hurricane Irene pummeled Long Island with heavy rain and high winds this weekend, many homes in Half Hollow Hills are still without power.

The LIPA Storm Center Outage map reports the following existing outages:

• 3,948 residents out of 8,882 in Dix Hills
• 732 residents out of 8,063 in Melville

By Monday at 4 p.m. a total of 178,000 customers were restored. About 345,000 LIPA customers remain without power. It's the Island's biggest power outage in 26 years.

LIPA predecessor, LILCO, dealt with 750,000 outages after Hurricane Gloria in 1985.

"Right now we are not estimating the power restoration time," company head Michael Hervey said at a Sunday afternoon news conference in Hicksville.

"We will be in damage assessment mode for the remainder of the afternoon into the evening and then picking up in the morning.

Hervey said the company would not give out an estimated restoration time until the initial damage estimate was complete.

"It's frustrating for customers, we realize that, we will try to get the estimate up as quickly as possible," he said.

Hervey said one of the key issues in restoring power is being able to get to substations on the South Shore and in the Rockaways that workers hadn't been able to reach on Sunday afternoon.

Although a lot of the damage assessment can only be done in daylight hours, Hervey promised that workers will be on the job throughout the night fixing problems that had already been identified. 

The company said there were outages reported throughout Long Island and that they were particularly concerned about areas along the Nassau-Suffolk border that had tornado watches posted.

National Grid's John Bruckner said there were already 1,000 workers dispatched out into the streets with another 300 expected to be dispatched by the end of Sunday. He was hoping to hire another 1,200 contractors by the end of the week.

The company also had hundreds of tree trimmers clearing the area around wires.

While there was no definitive time for power restoration, Hervey noted that "The history has been that we pick up a significant amount of customers in the first 24 to 36 hours and I expect that to be the case here."