Power Restored in Some Neighborhoods; Scattered Outages Remain in Port Chester

Power was restored to several dozen homes in Port Chester on Tuesday night, leaving one area outage and a few scattered homes throughout the village without juice.

After restoring power to on Monday night, repair crews from Con Ed brought several dozen more homes online at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Along with a few dozen isolated power outages, 16 homes in the Grace Church Street area were without power as of 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, according to the power company's updated outage map.

While some families are relieved to have the lights back on and the refrigerators humming, others may have to wait until Friday before utility crews bring their homes back online, according to Con Ed.

Port Chester Mayor Dennis Pilla said he's been in regular contact with the power company's emergency coordinator for Westchester County, receiving twice-daily updates.

The power company is treating the remaining outages with the same urgency, the mayor said.

"I have been assured that crews are in Port Chester working to restore power to everyone," the mayor wrote in response to a Patch inquiry.

Pilla said he'll meet with emergency managers from Westchester County and Con Ed "to go through a postmortem with them and our staff, so we can make the process better for next time."

For Trustee Bart Didden, improving the process means being more communicative with the public. In an e-mail to village hall staff on Monday, Didden said he'd spoken to residents who weren't able to reach anyone at the power company.

Many frustrated residents turned to their smartphones and social networks to vent.

"Our residents are complaining, maybe not to your office, or the police but on the social networks such as Facebook," Didden wrote.

Despite gloomy forecasts, f and relentless media hype, Hurricane Irene arrived in Westchester severely depleted in potency and downgraded by meteorologists to a tropical storm.

Without the threat of deadly wind gusts, flooding became the primary concern. While Port Chester had isolated pockets of flooding and a few closed roads in flood-prone areas, the village and flooding witnessed in , like Rye and Mamaroneck.

On Tuesday, the Port Chester Fire Department was still responding to storm-related emergency calls, Chief Kevin McFadden said. One firefighter was also injured in the storm, and the department has responded to more than 80 calls for service in the wake of the storm, McFadden said.

With hundreds of families in Port Chester off the grid for two or more nights, more than a few got by with their own generators. Once considered the type of hardware for worst-case-scenarios, generators are becoming more popular among families in Westchester County after several severe storms and floods in recent years.

The mayor said he doesn't have a generator, but purchasing one is on his to-do list after Hurricane Irene.

"I will be looking into a generator myself for the Pilla residence," he said.

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