Consistent power outages cost village thousands

By Matt Freeze, Senior Staff Writer, Morning Times —

Recent and consistent Sunday power outages over the last couple of months have been costing the Village of Owego thousands of dollars.

Village Utilities Director Dirk Mosher told trustees Monday that not only are the power supply issues expensive, but continually frustrating.

It’s every weekend, on Sunday, power was on and off every two minutes, Mosher said.

“I see tons of stuff on Facebook, but I never see anybody in here, in a proper forum, so I wanted to bring it up,” Mosher said.

“My side of it — I’ve spent literally tens of thousands of dollars in the last two years repairing, replacing, and hiring people to fix my equipment. Today I had to spend $200 on a power supply because of yesterday’s issues, and then in addition to that, there are thousands of dollars of overtime because it always seems to be on the weekends.”

The village trustees echoed in a chorus that it’s “always every Sunday.”

“It’s thousands of dollars for people to come in and babysit the plant all day, so it doesn’t go haywire,” Mosher said.

Deputy Mayor Charles Plater said he had seen a video on Facebook of a transformer with some sort of damage — “that was some crazy, scary stuff.”

“I don’t know what’s going on on the weekends,” Mosher said. “Transformers, they emergency replaced a pole near Adaline or Charlotte (streets) that was like waving in the breeze. But NYSEG really needs to get their stuff in gear because this is costing all these people a lot of money.”

Mayor Mike Baratta said NYSEG gave a basic press release answer stating that it was basically a coincidence that the outages are occurring every Sunday.

“They come in and say it wasn’t anything of theirs — it’s the wind or the weather, the heat,” Mosher said. “But, I’ve been told that one person somebody knows had a $5,000 washing machine get fried, (and it’s) frying TVs left and right.”

NYSEG previously told the Morning Times that the recent outages are “largely weather-related … the recent combination of hot weather and significant rainfall has created challenging tree conditions, and some trees have even uprooted and fallen into power lines. The Sunday pattern is largely coincidental.”