All but a handful of residents had their electricity restored by Saturday night, after a blizzard walloped the area with 29.1 inches of snow, leaving more than 100 customers without power that morning.
The timely restoration fulfilled expectations set forth by National Grid President John Bruckner, who said Friday thatpower would likely be restored within 24 hours of an outage.
Bruckner said the company had 700 high-voltage lineman and 250 tree-trimmers ready to act after the storm. In addition, National Grid upped the number of call-center personnel to communication during and after the storm.
National Grid fully restocked its supplies of power lines, transformers and wires so that workers did not have to wait for shipments to come in, like they did during Superstorm Sandy, he said.
Before the storm, National Grid officials predicted Long Island would see about 100,000 outages. The total outages were about 10,000.
The Long Island Power Authority put National Grid in charge of the storm response in the days leading up to Blizzard Nemo. The move was a recommendation by the Moreland Commission, which was appointed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo after LIPA, Con Edison and other utilities struggled to turn the lights back on after Sandy.
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