We are glad to hear that Senator Kemp Hannon will be examining Long Island’s emergency response system in light of last weekend’s storm. It appears from news reports and anecdotes that we’ve heard that LIPA’s storm response could have been a lot better.

While this storm was stronger than predicted, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Since we live in an area that gets major hurricanes every few decades, we should be prepared for storms such as last weekend’s.

We personally had a negative experience with LIPA during the storm. On Saturday evening the high winds tore the neutral leg of our power lines out of our house, causing huge fluctuations in our voltage. Many of our light bulbs flared up and burned out, while others were left dimly glowing.

Since our home was no longer grounded, we considered this to be a dangerous situation. However it was impossible to report it to LIPA because the call center apparently didn’t have enough live operators. We were finally able to reach a real human being early Sunday morning who put a report into the system. Later in the day, though, we were told that LIPA would not repair the problem (even though the wires were pulled out between the meter and the pole). Eventually we had to hire our own electrician to do the work.

We ended up with extensive damage to our electrical system and several appliances’ electronic controls were destroyed, but in spite of our tribulations, we fared better than those who had trees fall on their homes or were without power for four or five days.

It is definitely time for the Island’s emergency response to be re-examined, and we’re glad Senator Hannon is taking this initiative.

P.S. One thing we learned from all this is that power surge protectors are invaluable on all items that contain electronics. None of our electronic equipment or computers were damaged, but some of our appliances (which were just plugged directly into the outlets) were ruined.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher