RG&E says it is responding to concerns from some Irondequoit residents in the northwestern part of the town about frequent outages over the last several months.
The utility told WXXI News on Friday that it will be making upgrades to the circuit that supplies power to the northwest region of Irondequoit—approximately 3,000 feet of underground cable is being replaced with new cable. RG&E says this upgrade to be complete within a week.
Some Irondequoit residents have been on social media this week upset about what they feel has been too many power outages over the last several months. A relatively large outage on Wednesday affected parts of Irondequoit, Rochester and Greece.
And some residents in the northwest part of Irondequoit say it’s been one of several outages over the last year, including on days when there were no apparent weather events. One of the residents impacted is Mike Follaco, who says when these outages happen, it affects his work-day.
“With the coronavirus I’ve been working from home since March and this is the second time, maybe third, that my workday has been interrupted.” Follaco said that others in his neighborhood, “are really fed up at this point and looking to make a big stink over it and I don’t know what needs to be done, I don’t know what’s going to get them to take this seriously but maybe our entire neighborhood just needs to boycott paying our RG&E bill.”
Town Supervisor Dave Seeley says there have been too many outages in his town for this just to be a coincidence.
“It calls into question and just really makes you now think that there’s something wrong with the power grid or the infrastructure that’s causing these routine, non-occasional outages.” Seeley said that he has been in touch with R G and E about doing a deeper analysis of the issue.
RG&E responded with this statement on Friday:
“RG&E crews are working to make upgrades to the circuit that supplies power to the northwest region of Irondequoit—approximately 3,000ft of underground cable is being replaced with new cable. We expect this upgrade to be complete within a week. Providing safe and reliable service to our customers remains our priority and we will continue to make additional investments to further strengthen the reliability of our system. The company also remains in contact with local municipal leaders to provide updates on the status of this work."
