WEST SENECA, N.Y. (WIVB) — Wednesday’s winds left hundreds of West Seneca residents in the dark for a couple of hours, but residents in one neighborhood said this is nothing new.
“Whether it’s down for two hours or two days, we just want to know if there’s a way if they can fix it permanently so we don’t have a fear of this issue,” said Jerry Vinciguerra.
“Anytime we get the alerts, it’s 253 (homes) that are in this immediate area surrounded by other neighborhoods with power that seem to be affected more than the others,” said Jeremy Weingarden.
NYSEG, the provider for this neighborhood, sent out crews immediately and quickly restored power Wednesday.
“NYSEG, they send out alerts when they’re assessing an issue,” said Weingarden. “They send a text message out when the estimated restoration time is. Today they beat it by a couple of hours, they’re good in that area.”
Mike Baggerman with NYSEG said they are dedicated to helping their customers efficiently.
“We’re using more than 100 internal crews locally and an additional 70-plus in the Western New York area, and we’re dealing with this storm across the state,” Baggerman said. “So we’ve allocated more than 400 personnel to be able to adequately respond to any type of events that happen statewide.”
NYSEG said it is looking for solutions for these customers in the future, “whether it is replacing aging poles, whether it is modernizing substations, modernizing any of our electrical substructure, our goal is to have a strong and resilient grid so customers can have reliability in their communities,” said Baggerman.
Town Supervisor Gary Dickson said he will continue to communicate with NYSEG to help prevent future outages.
“We can dig a little deeper sometimes as to finding out the cause of an outage. But as far as when an outage actually happens, NYSEG has every incentive to get it resolved as quickly as possible,” said Dickson. “We have an excellent relationship with NYSEG and I’m going to talk to them about what they plan on doing to fix it.”
WIVB News 4 spoke with National Grid, who said their crews are working throughout the night to help their customers as well.
While power was restored to West Seneca Wednesday, neighbors are hopeful for long-term changes.
“If there’s a way to diagnose the problem and make an upgrade or a fix to solve this problem, I’m sure everyone would be very happy,” said Vinciguerra.
Angelica Gallagher is a Lancaster native who joined the News 4 team in 2025. See more of her work here.
