III — Hurricane experiences of power utilities in Long Island

THE Long Island Lighting Company system extends from the Rockaway beaches to Orient and Montauk points on the eastern end of the island, although the main part of our territory is, of course, outside of the city of New York. This territory is a little more than 100 miles long and at right angles to the path of the storm, with a maximum width of about 25 miles and a population in the whole area of something less than 700,000 people. The system has three main generating stations, one at Far Rockaway on Jamaica Bay, one at Northport on the north shore of Long Island in Suffolk County, and our principal station at Glenwood Landing which is also on the north shore in Hempstead Harbor. These stations feed into two 66-kv circuits on steel towers running down the backbone of Long Island. The hurricane of September covered this whole area and disrupted the service in varying degrees and intensities in practically all of it. Although the wind velocities reached as high as 100 miles per hour, the damage to transmission and distribution lines was caused almost entirely by trees falling against the poles or across the lines, except in some cases where the poles were set in soil which became really drifting sand due to the high water.