Generator powers Farmingdale Village Hall, firehouse amid outage

A power outage that struck Main Street in Farmingdale amid the heat wave Tuesday shut out the lights in Village Hall, the Farmingdale Village Fire Department and stores in the heart of downtown.

Village officials said Long Island Power Authority crews responded to the 3:15 p.m. outage and fixed the situation.

The fix lasted 20 minutes.

On Wednesday, Mayor George Starkie and village administrator Brian Harty said power remains out. And LIPA crews are on the scene, trying to figure out what went wrong.

"About a third of the businesses on Main Street are without power," Harty said. "The best-case scenario, we're told, is that the power will be back on at 7 o'clock tonight. The worst-case scenario is 8 o'clock in the morning."

Village Hall and the firehouse are running on a generator.

A village-owned generator broke down Tuesday at about 9:30 p.m. - in the middle of a board meeting. In a mad scramble to find a replacement, village officials contacted the Nassau County Office of Emergency Management.

They had a portable generator available. But that was on Carman Avenue in East Meadow.

About two hours later, the new generator had been set up - and power was restored. Harty said the board meeting was completed by 12:30 a.m.

"Anytime you have summers like this, it's not uncommon to have a problem with a transformer," Starkie said. "You're only as strong as your weakest link, and this transformer is the weakest link."

Still, officials are hopeful it can be repaired soon.

"You feel bad for the businesses," Harty said. "Some of them have perishables, and you don't want to see anyone have to go through that."

The situation in Farmingdale was just one in a series of localized outages in Nassau and Suffolk. About 640 customers across Long Island were without power at 1 p.m. Wednesday.

"Most of them are heat-related," LIPA spokeswoman Vanessa Baird-Streeter said. "Blown fuses and transformers from overusage . . . It's the heat."

One customer complained Wednesday that it was difficult to reach anyone at the power authority in an emergency.

Harry Katz, the owner of an adult home in Port Jefferson Station, said he called a LIPA emergency number after power went out Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. But Katz said he could only reach a recording instructing customers to leave information.

He left a message, and close to 9:30 p.m., he heard from LIPA, which promised to restore power by midnight, Katz said.

"The power came back right before midnight," said Katz, 57, of Southold. "But I think I should have been able to reach someone from LIPA directly."

The home has 49 residents aged 46-87, most of whom suffer from some form of mental illness, Katz said.

Baird-Streeter said the home had been given a special number that gives such facilities priority in emergency outages, but employees did not use that number to contact LIPA.

Baird-Streeter said a crew was dispatched at 10:22 p.m. and the power was restored at 11:30 p.m.

"It was a situation where you get the number, but you have no reason to use it and you don't realize it's there," she said. "They called the general number, a number that did not give them priority. It was just unfortunate."