As a nor'easter brings freezing rain, snow and high winds to many parts of New Jersey today, hundreds of thousands of people still don’t have power because of hurricane Sandy 9 days ago, and rumors are flying through the roof about all sorts of problems that the different utility companies are facing.

Utility poles (User submitted photo from Bob of Stockholm)
Utility poles (User submitted photo from Bob of Stockholm)
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Ron Morano of JCP&L says the rumor that there’s a shortage of power poles is absolutely false.

“There is no utility pole shortage, there is no supply shortage,”  says Morano. “We have ample supplies to repair our services that are out, to replace poles, to hang wire … there are a number of damaged areas we’re working on, but there’s absolutely no truth to that rumor, and it’s also not true we turned away non–union crews from Alabama.”

He says if people are still without power but their neighbors have it, “it is possible that crews were working on a larger project which may be a piece of an entire circuit and had to do some work to repair that circuit and one individual customer is not a part of that circuit.”

As for the rumor that some customers won’t be re-connected until Thanksgiving, Morano says, “that is totally untrue – we’re working to restore the vast majority of our customers later today and customers in the hard-hit areas will be expected to be restored throughout the coming week.”

He’s quick to add however, “that does exclude customers on the barrier islands and the coastal towns of Monmouth and Ocean Counties where it’s unsafe for us to energize, and we can’t completely restore because of the severe damage that’s taken place there – we are working on a plan to start that as well.”

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