LIPA vows 99% to have power back Sunday

About 99 percent of Long Island Power Authority customers who experienced outages from Tropical Storm Irene will have power restored by Sunday, the agency said.

LIPA chief Michael Hervey said Saturday that the authority could see the "light at the end of the tunnel" in its massive power restoration effort.

"Our target is to have essentially all of the outages restored sometime during the day or evening Sunday," Hervey said.

LIPA officials said that as of Saturday afternoon, 94 percent of the customers who lost power had been restored. About 4,000 line and tree crews were working across Long Island to get the lights back on.

There were still about 18,000 customers without power Saturday night, LIPA said.

One day after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo urged National Grid, the firm that operates the electric distribution system for LIPA, to restore power, state Sen. Carl L. Marcellino (R-Syosset), chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Investigations and Government Operations, joined state Sen. Charles J. Fuschillo Jr. (R-Merrick), a member of the Senate's Energy and Telecommunications Committee, in a call to postpone LIPA's plans to sign a new contract with National Grid.

The current contract expires in 2013, and LIPA's board of trustees is scheduled to vote on the $2.3-billion contract on Sept. 22.

Power outages were "still rampant" a week after the storm, and any decision on a new contract should come only after "there has been a thorough review" of the LIPA and National Grid storm response, Marcellino said in a statement Saturday.

Cuomo on Friday said that the renewal of National Grid's contract with LIPA could be in jeopardy unless power was promptly restored to tens of thousands of customers.

Hervey declined to comment on Cuomo's comments Saturday.

But Howard Steinberg, chairman of the LIPA board of trustees, said board members were growing concerned about LIPA's storm response, particularly after reports that customers were left with little or no information about lingering outages.

He promised that the board would conduct an extensive review of the storm response and restoration effort as soon as this week.

Steinberg, who said he had lost power for three days, said he was "troubled by the stories I've been hearing about and reading with respect to communications."

Saturday, Hervey said lack of frequent updates from field crews to the outage computer system dogged LIPA's efforts to provide desperately needed information about crew assignments and restoration times to customers. The system was only fully operational in the last two days -- well after it could be useful to most.

"I wish we had it earlier," Hervey said of the computer system. "People need to have that information and we need to modify the system to be able to provide it."

With Keith Herbert