EDEN, N.Y. — It’s been over 24 hours since high winds began impacting all of Western New York, but on Thursday, parts of the Town of Eden still remain in the dark.
The small town of just 7,500 saw the worst of the storm with wind gusts reaching hurricane-like speeds, ripping down trees and power lines, including one along Route 62 spanning a quarter of a mile.
In all, the storm knocked out the lights for almost 85% of the town and is now in a High Wind Watch as of Thursday Morning.
National Grid has been working to restore the power but said towns like Eden just aren’t built to handle these conditions.
“The infrastructure is, from engineering standards, built to be to withstand 50 miles an hour,” said Marc Gaschwend is with National Grid. “When we see extreme wind sources like that up above 50 it's where can be a concern. In, the City of Buffalo, a lot of then the infrastructure is underground. That's unique to the city within city limits. When you get outside of the city, everything is overhead.”
As of 6:30 a.m., Erie County customers between National Grid and NYSEG are dealing with the most current outages at a number reaching almost 4,000.
Eden Town Supervisor Rich Ventry said he spoke with National Grid and learned that 1,000 customers are still without power as of Wednesday afternoon. He said he hopes they will have power restored by Thursday evening or Friday at the latest.
In the meantime, the town and National Grid working to give residents the supplies they need, handing out over 5,000 pounds of dry ice and bottled water. They plan to do the same on Thursday if needed after running out of supplies within three hours on Wednesday.
“We were expecting maybe 50 to 100 cars over the four hours,” Ventry said. “It was that in about five minutes.”