CL&P President Tours Guilford After Sandy

Yesterday afternoon, CL&P President William Herdegen toured Guilford, visiting Guilford Food Center and Greene Art Gallery. First Selectman Joseph Mazza and Board of Selectman member Charles Havrda led the tour.

Herdegen spoke with Ron Rosa, owner of the Guilford Food Center, about Sandy's impact on his business. Rosa commented losses this year were much less substantial than the losses he sustained last year from Irene. Herdegen also visited Greene Art Gallery and talked with Kathryn H. Greene about CL&P's progress in tackling the outages in Guilford.

Herdegen stressed that CL&P upped its efforts to make sure the eastern part of the state received the proper treatment as Sandy hit. "My counterpart is heading up the operations out of Madison," said Herdegen. "He's purposely here so he is close and he has all of the resources available."

"We brought people into the state before the storm hit," he continued. "We hired electritions to put individual services back, and I think that's going to help."

The CL&P president also stated he was aware of the transformer incident that took place on Peddlers Road. "We'll take care of it," Herdegen said. "I'll try to make sure the appropriate response is taken care of in a timely manner."

He stressed that CL&P focused on getting all of the polling places up in communities, an effort that has been a success here in Guilford, as all of the locations are with power.

First Selectman Mazza wanted to stress the importance of communication, and that CL&P needed to provide the town with correct information. "When the CL&P Vice President stepped in on Thursday, that was a tremendous help," said Mazza. "Before that, we weren't always getting accurate information from the embedded representative."

Herdegen agreed that communication was something CL&P continued to try and improve to make operations run smoother.

The First Selectman also expressed his disappointment that CL&P did not provide enough 'make safe' crews immediately after the storm hit. "We're a geographically large town," Mazza noted. "There's a lot of infrastructure to maintain, and the one crew we were given was simply not enough of a response."

As work continues, Mazza wanted to reinforce the need for the CL&P crews to stay in the town until the job was complete, and not be relocated or reassigned.