Village Releases Update on Power Restoration

PSE&G and Power Restoration Update

The Village understands the incredible frustration felt by each of you still awaiting the restoration of your power. Village officials have been in constant contact with PSE&G, many times a day, to receive updates and progress reports, to report continuing outages or outages that have erroneously been reported as restored, and to strongly advocate for our residents and restore our power as soon as possible. 

Despite those efforts, every local government is ultimately still entirely dependent on PSE&G both as to repairs and restorations, as well as for information, as many of our neighbors facing similar challenges are. We have enlisted the support of our elected State Representatives, Assemblywoman Jasey and Assemblyman McKeon, as well as Senator Codey, Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, Assemblyman Chivukula (Assembly Telecommunications and Utilities Chair) and the Office of the Governor. Village officials have been in daily communication with these offices, and local officials in other towns with similar frustrations, who continue to advocate on our behalf. Wednesday morning the Village President met with Essex County mayors and state representatives and strongly voiced the complete frustration with what the Village views as totally unsatisfactory communication practices throughout this storm.  These concerns were expressed directly to Ralph Izzo, CEO of PSE&G, in addition to the PSE&G government affairs representatives present. We are committed to pursuing these grievances with the Board of Public Utilities, which regulates PSE&G, through legislative channels as well as the Office of the Governor, to compel improvements to PSE&G's responsiveness and transparency.

In an effort to provide as much information as possible to our residents, we continue to publicize the PSE&G reports and restoration estimates and numbers to the community. However, we cannot vouch for the accuracy of these numbers and indeed have found many of them to be inaccurate or not up to date. As of Wednesday morning, the Village has been assured by PSE&G, which is confirmed as accurate, that individual line restorations have begun in South Orange and are told that restorations will be complete by Friday, though the Village cannot guarantee the accuracy of that timeline. We appreciate and ask for your continued feedback as to outages so we can hold PSE&G accountable for the restorations they report to us. Like you, we - and many other municipal officials we have been in contact with - are frustrated by what appears to be constantly moving targets and changing and inconsistent reports from PSE&G about restoration timelines and, as mentioned, we are taking all available action to hold PSE&G accountable and get power to SO residents as soon as possible. We will continue to post any updates and information received from PSE&G online here.

We appreciate all of your patience and the great spirit of community demonstrated in South Orange with neighbors helping neighbors, and will continue to advocate and fight for our residents until we feel our - and our neighbors in other municipalities - concerns are heard and action taken by PSE&G and the State of New Jersey to ensure this does not happen again.

Ensure you report your outage directly to PSE&G, and you can send any additional information toemergencymanagement@southorange.org