BUFFALO, N.Y. — The power is back on in North Buffalo after more than ten thousand customers lost it Monday, and then some again on Tuesday, so 2 On Your Side had some questions for National Grid about what happened.
A piece of underground equipment failed Monday night causing around 12,000 customers to lose power in North Buffalo and Parkside.
"In order for us to diagnose that issue and make the repair, it took some time," said David Bertola, a spokesperson for National Grid.
By 3 a.m. Tuesday, everyone's power was back on, but in order to make permanent repairs, some lost it again during the day Tuesday.
"We had contacted, actually, those customers who were impacted or who were to be impacted via phone blast and explained that you may experience service interruptions throughout the day yesterday. Some customers even may have been impacted twice," Bertola said.
And National Grid says the work was done by 8 p.m. Tuesday.
"Some people were wondering if they can get a refund. Can they get a refund?" Kelly Dudzik asked.
"According to Public Service Law 73, customers need to be without service for 72 consecutive hours. We weren't really anywhere near that threshold, so unfortunately, it doesn't appear that anybody would be eligible for that kind of reimbursement, and that reimbursement typically is related to food and medication that may have been in a refrigerator and spoiled," Bertola said.
If you haven't already, you can sign up for text updates from National Grid. There's also an app.
"You can do everything from report an outage to report an emergency or even check the status of an outage on the outage map," Bertola said.
If you have a National Grid account, you can register to receive updates by texting REG to 64743. You will be asked to reply with your 10-digit electricity account number.