Power Restoration is Slow to Come in Springfield

The good new is that the lights are going on in Springfield households. The bad news is that they are not going on in enough of them.

Jersey Central Power & Light’s website, power has been restored to about 150 Springfield homes. Meanwhile, 1,937 households still lack power as of noon on Tuesday, Nov 1.

The power company still maintains that 95 percent of the original 356,000 customers who lost power statewide will have power restored by Thursday evening and the last 5 percent will have power by Friday. They say they have already restored power to 234,000 of that total number.

The slow response mirrors JCP&L’s treatment to outages during Hurricane Irene. In September, Springfield Township Administrator Anthony Cancro delivered a stinging indictment of the power company’s performance in a complaint to New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities. , Cancro outlined longstanding and recent problems with the power company and upbraided the company for its unreliability, poor maintenance and lack of communication, and characterized the JCP&L’s response to the hurricane as “lackadaisical” and “dismal.”

Township sources working with the power company now said that JCP&L has not improvements since then. In this restoration the company has reportedly accepted neither direction or help from local workers and officials.