Hurricane/Super Storm Sandy presented a tremendous challenge to everyone on the East Coast. In New Jersey, millions were without power for days, even weeks, and many residents lost their homes, property and even their lives.
In the aftermath of the storm, although local, county and state emergency workers and first responders were working hard alongside utility workers from all over the country, many public officials and citizens noticed, for the second year in a row, a lack of reliable, accurate and timely information from New Jersey's utility companies regarding the restoration of power to residents, businesses, critical public safety facilities, gas stations, nursing homes and more.
We believe in joining together to help utility companies upgrade their infrastructure, reformat their communications plans and how the prepare for and respond to disasters on this scale, which are seemingly becoming more common. We are not interested in pointing fingers, but rather identifying areas that need improvement and making legislative changes to see those changes through so that next time New Jersey is hit with a storm, we're more prepared, more responsive and better able to take care of our residents.
On behalf of our community members, we believe:
- The BPU should require utilities to provide authoritative, informed spokespeople to take complaints from customers and provide information in the municipal building of any municipality where more than 5% of customers are without services for more than one day
- The BPU should set and enforce stronger standards for accuracy and timeliness of the information, specially online information, utilities provide about outages and projected restoration timelines
- The BPU should re-evaluate and improve the process by which utilities collect, manage and assign repairs during extreme weather events, including for out of state workers
- The BPU should require utilities to issue pre-scheduled twice-daily detailed reports to officials in municipalities experiencing service interruptions, which would include an update to previously reported status of restoration as well as a schedule of intended repairs for at a minimum the next twelve hours
- Any state utility company should be required to have its emergency preparedness and response plan approved by the State of New Jersey
- The BPU and New Jersey Legislature conduct an investigation of how PSE&G manages information, communicates and prepares and responds to extreme power outages, and for the New Jersey Legislature to compel all public utility companies, through legislative action to adopt the recommendations resulting from this investigation
- Local resolutions should be sent to all municipalities which experienced a prolonged loss of power for consideration of passage of sister resolutions, and to county, state and federal legislators and officials as well as the Office of the Governor, the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, NJ Utility companies, and the New Jersey League of Municipalities.
Who we are
We are made up of towns that have added their support to look into finding legislative fixes to problems that arose throughourt the duration of the Hurricane Sandy storm response.
- South Orange, Essex County
- Maplewood, Essex County
- Red Bank, Monmouth County
- New Milford, Bergan County