Steve Orr

@SOrr1

RG&E and its sister company NYSEG have 1,300 employees and contractors in the field to repair power lines that were damaged or destroyed by Wednesday's windstorm, the companies said Thursday.

In an encouraging sign, the number of RG&E customers with no electricity had fallen from nearly 92,000 to 87,600 by late Thursday afternoon.

But neither RG&E nor NYSEG had begun providing estimates of when power might be restored at any given location, and the companies warned in a statement that some outages would be a "multi-day event." They referred people to their outage webpages for information on restoration times, though those webpages did not provide specific estimates for customers in the Rochester region.

RG&E and NYSEG said their first task after the storm was to depower and remove downed power lines. RG&E alone had 2,500 of them. Damage assessment followed, and initial restoration efforts focused on critical structures such as police stations and health-care facilities. They said they also were focusing on repairing larger transmission and distribution lines whose restoration would benefit the largest number of people.

RG&E may be able to begin providing estimated restoration times for groups of customers on Friday, company officials said.

The company urged its customers to sign up for text, email or voice alerts of outage-related information, including restoration times, for specific addresses.

More than 125,000 customers of the two utilities lost power during the storm, and the vast majority of them remained without electricity late Thursday afternoon. About 87,600 of those still without power were Rochester Gas and Electric customers in Monroe County. How many of the utility crews were assigned to RG&E territory, and specifically how many were working in Monroe County, was not disclosed.

New York State Electric and Gas had 24,000 customers still without power Thursday afternoon. Most of them were in Erie, Wyoming and Niagara counties, though hundreds more were scattered through 18 other counties located as far east as the Hudson Valley.

RG&E and NYSEG, owned by Spanish energy giant Iberdrola SA, said they had obtained assistance from the four regulated New York state utilities that weren't hard-hit by the storm — Con Edison, Orange & Rockland, Central Hudson and PSEG Long Island. Utilities from Canada, as well as contract electricity workers and tree crews, also had been brought in.

By way of comparison, the other large upstate utility, National Grid, said Thursday it had 1,700 utility workers in the field. The company had up to 147,000 customers without service after the storm.

More specifically, National Grid said 1,100 of those workers were in Genesee, Wyoming, Orleans, Erie and Niagara counties, the hardest-hit part of its service territory, where about 64,000 customers still had no electricity Thursday afternoon.

National Grid's deployment there gave it 17.2 utility field workers for 1,000 customers without power. The comparable figure for RG&E and NYSEG was considerably lower — 10.4 workers per 1,000 customers.

National Grid's Steve Brady cautioned that comparisons may not be apt because the nature and geographic dispersion of the storm damage may be different between various companies' service territories. "It’s not as simple as a ratio like that," he said.

RG&E spokeswoman Juanita Washington didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

National Grid, unlike the Iberdrola companies, was able to provide restoration times for at least some of its powerless customers Thursday. It expected to have power back to all of its customers in western Monroe County by 6 p.m. Friday, according to the company's outage website.

SORR@Gannett.com

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