Last week's heat wave left thousands of Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) customers without power, including many Nassau County residents, who at times were forced to bear the sweltering temperatures in the dark, and without relief from air conditioners and fans.

On Thursday morning, as the Northeast region entered the fifth day of temperatures above 90 degrees, LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel, staged a press conference at the authority's headquarters on Old Country Road in Hicksville to declare an ongoing Stage One Power Alert. The announcement was an extension of the alert declared Wednesday. Kessel reported that there had been some 22,000 power outages throughout Long Island during the past three days, including 8,000 outages Wednesday. He urged all customers to immediately reduce electric use as much as possible to reduce the potential for more outages due to excessive heat and high demand. Asked which communities had suffered the outages, Kessel said that they were scattered - citing a few on the east end, many in western Suffolk, and central Nassau, and a major outage in Port Washington Tuesday night. Outages were also reported in some neighborhoods in Hicksville on Tuesday and Wednesday. For example, a block of apartments in the northwest section of Hicksville was without electricity from 8:30 p.m. Tuesday evening to 2 a.m. Wednesday.

According to Kessel, all outages were caused by equipment failures, due to the heat, for example overheated transformers - not by lack of supply. However, he cautioned residents to continue to cut back on energy use until the weekend, when the heat was expected to break. "This heat wave is on. We have to battle Mother Nature at least another 24 hours," he said. On Wednesday, LIPA reached a peak hour demand of 4565 megawatts (MW), which was only 80 MW shy of the available electric supply of 4645 MW. "We made it through yesterday's excessive heat with some luck, a lot of hard work, and with a heavy push for energy conservation on the part of our customers," said Kessel. "We may be pushed beyond the limits of our supply today, if we don't keep up with efforts to conserve electricity." He urged LIPA's 1.1 million customers to eliminate all non-essential electric use such as decorative indoor and outdoor lighting, set air conditioner thermostats to 78 degrees, and shut them off when not at home, use fans rather than air conditioners when possible, and not use washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and other home appliances. Businesses were asked to reduce lighting use to a minimum, use computers and office machines only if absolutely necessary, and consider closing early for the day.

Kessel also credited the LIPA-Keyspan partnership, formed in the late 1990s through a partial state takeover of the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), with successfully handling the heat wave. "LIPA-Keyspan working together - it's really making a huge difference in how we're handling things," he said. During the last major heat wave on Long Island, in the summer of 1999, many customers went without power for days. Following that incident, LIPA replaced several thousand transformers, which has enabled the authority to be more prepared for the current heat storm, Kessel noted.

Bob Katell, president of Keyspan, commended the gas and electric employees who have been working outdoors in extremely hot conditions to maintain services. He also thanked the public for their cooperation in conservation efforts, but said that conservation is not enough to prepare for Long Island's future energy needs. Echoing the call for more power plants voiced by the Long Island business community in recent weeks, he said that plans are under way to build more such facilities on Long Island. "We do need to have more generating plants here on Long Island," he said.

Members of the entire Long Island community were doing their part to conserve energy on Thursday. Over 300 large major LIPA customers were participating in a peak load reduction partnership, which was expected to save about 80-85 MW during the peak demand period of 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. LIPA asked heads of local governments to send employees home by 3 p.m., and to avoid using appliances once they got home. And, Governor George Pataki waived the fees for towns beaches to encourage people to head to the shores to cool off, rather than putting on their air conditioners.