Officials with RG&E and its affiliated company NYSEG say they were bracing for power outages due to Friday's winter storm, and that's what they got.
The outages at their peak, appeared to hit areas south of Rochester the hardest, particularly Livingston and Allegany Counties, which each reported more than 4,000 customers without power early Friday morning.
By midday Friday, that number was down to less than 400 in Livingston County, and just under 3,000 in Allegany County. There were several hundred customers without power in Monroe, Ontario and other nearby counties on Friday morning.
The number of Monroe County outages rose to about 3,700 late Friday afternoon, and then fell back to just a couple of hundred later in the day.
The utilities say that they have more than 1,000 personnel working on the storm response efforts, many of them related to to the heavy, wet snow bringing down tree branches and power lines.
"With the several weeks of wind that we’ve already had, we knew that many of the tree limbs were already weakened by some of the gusty winds from the week before so we were expecting some of that, and most of those outages are caused by some of those downed tree limbs," said Juanita Washington, a spokeswoman for RG&E.
You are asked to report any downed power lines to RG&E by calling 1-800-743-1701. For more information visit www.rge.com.
