Pleasantville Mayor's Update — 5 p.m. Saturday

The following is from Pleasantville Mayor Peter Scherer:

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CON EDISON

We continue to be frustrated by a lack of information from Con Edison. This morning's conference call with municipalities throughout Westchester made clear that, with few exceptions, most communities have the same frustrations...lots of outages and no sign of restoration crews.
The challenges remain substantial, and our nearby neighbors are in worse shape than P'ville...many with roads blocked, schools closed without power and 60-80% of homes without power. Con Edison reports that nursing homes, schools and election polling sites have priority over residential outages. Our outages remain at roughly 25-30% of homes...my own among them.

We continue to push Con Ed, both in public forums and behind the scenes, to address the outages in Pleasantville and to provide solid information that allows people to create realistic plans. I am promised better information tomorrow morning and will report as soon as it appears.
The official Con Edison statement says that it "expects to restore the vast majority of customers" by the weekend of November 10-11. They say that "the remaining customer restorations could take an additional week or more."

GAS SUPPLIES are a bit better today, and the regional emergency managers tell us that shortages should ease considerably within the next 1-3 days. We'll believe that when it happens...but the positive reports sound promising. The Village supply for emergency and service vehicles is in good shape.

OUR WATER SYSTEM is (and will remain) in good shape. Neighbors in the Skytop/Brentwood area have suffered this week from low water pressure caused by power loss at a pump station. That problem got worse today, and we have installed a trailer-mounted emergency generator to power these pumps. We apologize to neighbors in the area for the noise of this large generator...but we have no alternative means of maintaining water pressure to homes and fire hydrants.

THE WEATHER REPORT calls for an overnight low tonight at about the freezing point...unhappy news for those without power and heat. We are concerned about a possible storm in the forecast for the middle of next week...still rather speculative this far out. We don't expect anything major, but nobody needs more rain and wind.

SUNDAY ACTIVITIES The LIBRARY is open until 8 pm today (Saturday) and will be open from 1-8 on Sunday...providing a place to warm up, use the wireless internet and connect with neighbors.

The BURNS MEDIA LAB (corner of Manville and Grant) will be open tomorrow (Sunday) from 10 am - 7 pm for people who are without power. They'll show family movies in the small screening room from 10 - 1 and will show Sunday football games in the afternoon. Wi-Fi is available there as well.

Thanks again for all the good will among neighbors...which is apparent everywhere I go in the Village.

Peter