2018 Winter Storm Restoration Crew

March 9, 2018: A line crew from Paducah Power System will provide winter storm recovery assistance in New York. Late yesterday, PPS accepted a request from Con Edison to help restore electricity to Con Edison’s service territory hit hard by two destructive winter storms in the past week. Con Edison serves 10-million people in New York City and Westchester County, New York.

The six-man PPS crew left early this morning, expecting a seventeen-hour drive. They took a bucket truck, a truck used for setting poles and a foreman’s truck. Their first stop, as of today, will be a staging area at Playland Amusement Park in Rye, New York, near the Connecticut state line.

Paducah Power provides mutual aid to other municipal electric utilities when possible and has previously sent crews to areas damaged by hurricanes. Crews worked in Homestead, Florida last September following Hurricane Irma, in 2004 following Hurricanes Francis and Jeanne and in 2005 after Hurricane Wilma. They also assisted Memphis Light, Gas and Water in 2005 when remnants of Katrina caused damage there.

“While our previous mutual aid work has been hurricane recovery, we expect the damage in New York to be similar to that of our 2009 ice storm, so we carry that experience with us,” said Rick Windhorst, PPS Director of Engineering.

Con Edison says 2,000 linemen are helping to restore power in what is the fifth largest outage of the utility’s history.