Town of Highland Takes Key Lessons from Recent Power Outages

The first taste of winter brought more than just snow to the Catskills and Northeast Pennsylvania, as thousands were left without electricity for hours, or even days.

According to NYSEG, the main cause of these outages was the heavy, consistent snow that fell from Thursday night into Friday.

Senior Communications Manager for NYSEG Shelby Cohen told WBNG in Binghamton, “When wet heavy snow falls and those trees fall, they can fall onto our lines and the trees themselves take a lot of load when the snow accumulates that’s very heavy and very wet and that can contribute to outages as well.”

In Pennsylvania, at one point on Friday, the PPL Electric Utilities outage map showed about 78,000 customers affected in an area stretching from Northeast Pennsylvania to the Lancaster area.

Power is back for most folks across the region. One of the local areas hardest hit during the snowstorm was the Town of Highland, New York.

We spoke to John Pizzolato, Town Supervisor at Town Of Highland, about the community’s resilience and lesson learned from the snowstorm.

Image Credit: NYSEG