'F-Minus': Daughter Of Commack Elderly Parents Grades PSEG

COMMACK, NY — Laura Rizzo Krummenacker gave PSEG Long Island a grade for its handling of Tropical Storm Isaias — especially with how it relates to her elderly parents having gone five days without power in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Do you have an F-minus?" she said. "F is too high to give them on the way they handled this. They failed tremendously."

Krummenacker's parents, who live in Commack, were without electricity from Tuesday through Sunday following the storm. Her father, 83, and mother, 80, were told by PSEG their power would be restored within two days of Isaias, Krummenacker said. Her parents are on a PSEG emergency list, she said, due to her mother's use of an oxygen tracheal tube, as well as a ventilator she needs to sleep. Once the power went out, the couple relied on a generator to keep the ventilator working.

"If the generator fails, guess what? We’d be at a funeral right now," Krummenacker said. "If that generator failed them, then my mother didn’t breathe."

Both parents, who have been married for 60 years, lost sleep over that, according to their daughter. They filled out papers to get on the electric company's priority list, according to Krummenacker.

"What was the point of being on that list?" she said. "What really got me angry was my dad said he wasn’t sleeping because he was afraid the generator would shut off. Not for nothing, that’s not fair."

PSEG Long Island has a Critical Care Program where the company encourages those who — either for themselves or a family member — are on life-support equipment requiring electricity to let them know.

"We understand the critical need for power when life-support equipment is in use," the company states on its website. "It's your responsibility to plan ahead to meet your medical needs if the power goes out. But you can receive enhanced notifications with our Critical Care Program.When there is severe weather, we will stay in touch with you. If you lose power, every effort will be made to restore it as soon as possible. However, there may be circumstances when timely restoration is difficult, particularly in the case of a severe storm...Participation in the Critical Care Program does not guarantee priority power restoration."

Ventilators are one of the pieces of life-support equipment listed on the site.

Her parents couldn't be moved from their home to Krummenacker's or her sister's due to the coronavirus outbreak, Krummenacker said. "It wasn’t even a decision of taking my mother out of there. We asked her if she wanted to go to my sister’s, but then you have to move all the equipment, too."

Krummenacker called PSEG's emergency line on her parents' behalf three times a day, she said. She said she had to wait anywhere from 25 to 40 minutes each time, she said.

She realizes the tropical storm brought challenges for PSEG, but she said she doesn't understand why the company wasn't prepared. Krummenacker's father is a United States veteran and a 53-year volunteer of the Commack Fire Department.

"That [PSEG] emergency list was supposed to be there for a reason," she said. "It’s like when you call a fire department to dispatch. Do you know how many times my dad’s gotten up in the middle of the night and gone to a ‘house fire’ that wasn’t a house fire? Imagine if my father decided, ‘I’m not going.’ Really? He’s a volunteer. They’re not people who have to do this. You know how many times there weren’t really fires, thank God? There’s the chance there is going to be a fire, too.

"In the COVID situation, which makes it even worse, because you can’t even remove them from there, and [PSEG] did nothing to rectify the problem but tell us they were sorry. All they did was apologize."

PSEG said it has adapted its storm and safety procedures during the coronavirus outbreak to follow public health guidelines and industry best practices.

"We thank our customers for their patience as we operate under these unusual circumstances to safely restore power as quickly as possible," the company said in a statement.

Roughly 420,000 PSEG Long Island customers were impacted by Isaias, according to the company. On Thursday night, PSEG said about 85 percent of its customers would have power restored by the end of the day Friday, with the remainder back up by Saturday. That timeline was pushed back several times since then and by noon Sunday, PSEG still had not restored power to 85 percent of the impacted customers.

As of 2:29 p.m. Tuesday, more than 25,000 customers were without power. Approximately 3,800 of that total are outages reported during the storm, PSEG said.