Tree topples and lands on Brooke Anderson's car in Nyack

PEARL RIVER - Nearly 40,000 O&R electric customers whose power was knocked out by Hurricane Sandy have been returned to service Wednesday as O&R continued its massive efforts to repair its transmission lines and substations, make safe its downed wires and rebuild its electric distribution system.

More than 1,000 O&R employees and over 1,000 contractors from almost 20 states are working on rebuilding O&R’s electric system so that O&R can repair widespread, devastating damage from Hurricane Sandy and restore electric service to the remaining 194,000 customers. At the height of the hurricane’s outages, O&R had 230,000 customers without service.

O&R projects based on preliminary analysis that a majority of those customers should have their electricity back on within 10 days from the storm’s end Tuesday, but complete repairs and total service restoration could take weeks.

O&R has thus far repaired 13 of its 27 damaged transmission lines, seven of its17 de-energized substations, and 20 of its 105 downed distribution circuits.

O&R continues to engage in a systematic inspection, damage assessment, reconstruction and restoration process. This effort is expected to take weeks to complete.

O&R is taking a multi-pronged approach to system restoration:

The first priority is to restore the system’s backbone by repairing transmission circuits and substations. That work must take place before distribution, or local load, can be restored.

At the same time, a second set to teams is being deployed onto the distribution system in a systematic and pre-determined manner that includes:

Damage assessment on state, county and major local roads.