Snow coats power and telephone lines Saturday night during a blackout on Main Street in downtown Lake Placid. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

LAKE PLACID — As this village’s trustees and department heads debriefed Tuesday on a sudden, 19-hour blackout Saturday and Sunday, Mayor Craig Randall said it was one of the top three weather emergencies in this village’s modern history.

The mayor attributed the debilitating two days to Lake Placid’s unique location: inside a geographical basin at 1,800 feet, surrounded by mountain ranges.

That much is not news for many locals, who now want to know what the village will do to prevent such a surprisingly calamitous outage — a situation that nearly elicited a state-of-emergency declaration this weekend. Elected officials and business leaders are already discussing changes to ensure this kind of extended outage doesn’t happen again.

Speaking Wednesday afternoon, Randall said the village will ask National Grid to “improve” the power line’s right of way.

“When you stand at the firehouse and look at the power line coming in over the track, what you see is a fairly wide area. You don’t see trees along it that would typically reach poles or lines.

“But I’m told, when you get in the area (where the power line was knocked out), the rail right of way gets rather narrow — the hillsides come in,” he continued. “The trees on hillsides were tall enough and close enough that, if it went over, they would cause the damage that we saw.

“I suspect that we are going to take some initiatives there to try and get something more done about that right of way.”

At the location of the incident, Randall said, the right of way may be fewer than 20 feet, primarily because of the hillsides.

“It seems to me, any (tree) that can come down and take out the 150,000-volt line is a real issue,” he said. “We will take some steps to investigate what can be done about that so we don’t face the same situation again.”

Village police Chief Bill Moore, who worked Saturday night through Sunday morning at the village and town’s emergency headquarters at the firehouse, echoed Randall’s sentiment.

“I would like to see the right of ways wider than they are, (but) that’s a call that’s out of my (jurisdiction),” Moore said. “I’d imagine it’s sort of narrow because of the Adirondack Park regulations.”

Speaking Wednesday, state Department of Environmental Conservation spokesman David Winchell said that every part of the power line south of state Route 86 resides in the right of way within the Saranac Lake Wild Forest. He added that he anticipates the DEC will conduct “extensive research” about the history of the power line and the corridor it runs through, considering village officials’ post-blackout thoughts.

“I’m assuming Lake Placid village is going to come to us and ask to try to look at resolving the situation,” he said. “It would appear to me it would be DEC that would have the lead on reviewing it and making any determinations regarding that access.”

Longtime Lake Placid electric Superintendent Peter Kroha has served as an employee of the department since before the village erected the controversial power line in the late ’70s — in time for the 1980 Olympics.

On Monday, Kroha said the only way to solve the problem is to widen the right of way through which the power line travels to Lake Placid.

“The problem with the right of way is, to have that right of way for the Olympics, we had to go down the train tracks, and it’s a very, very narrow right of way,” Kroha said.

“Normally when they build transmission lines, they cut back 50 to 60 feet — both sides — of any trees,” he continued. “This is like 10 to 15 feet, and it’s state land. National Grid went in and marked a lot of trees to be cut, back in — right after the (1998) ice storm — and we were only allowed to cut a portion of those trees because it’s on state land.”

The power line’s construction was a hot-button topic in the lead-up to the then-controversial 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, as it was constructed across mostly private land — that of more than 30 land owners — between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. State Public Service Commission Chairman Charles Zielinski defended the construction project in a letter to the editor the Enterprise published on Sept. 7, 1978. He said the power line was to be constructed on an existing right of way cleared for a previous 46,000-volt line, as well as along road and railroad corridors. He noted that they tried to “minimize the amount of tree-clearing required for the right-of-way.”

He continued to write how the route was proposed by Lake Placid and certified on the merits of “environmental compatibility” and “public need” by the PSC, DEC and APA.

“We diverted the line away from the widest part of Kurun(g) Pond, avoided a crossing of the wilderness, minimized the need for new clearing near Wolf Pond, and selected a path near the Saranac Lake Golf Club to save a stand of trees,” Zielinski wrote. “To go further, we acted to protect some ecologically sensitive wetlands, and included a provision to review construction practices to prevent disruption of fragile surface.

“I think our action will stand the scrutiny of fair-minded persons,” he concluded.

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Communication breakdown?

Randall, who was in New Jersey during the storm attending the baptism of his grandson, said he also spoke Tuesday with others, including Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism CEO Jim McKenna, about improving communication.

The mayor said messages from the village’s dispatch center, such as text message alerts to village residents and tourists, would be looked into to help during a similar emergency situation in the future. Randall said it would require software for the village to invest in, perhaps similar to what’s used by the Lake Placid Central School District or Essex County.

Even four days removed from the storm, village officials still couldn’t shake the freaky nature of what happened.

Randall emphasized how the poles to access the severed line were too icy for Northline Utilities crew members from AuSable Forks to scale Saturday night. He also added that village trustee and Golden Arrow Resort owner Peter Holderied said Saturday’s storm produced the largest snowflakes Holderied, a Lake Placid lifer, had ever seen.

Randall also elaborated on why the village contracted Northline: because other National Grid employees were repairing a similar transmission line problem near Boonville.

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Mayor on financial hit

As for the toll village businesses undertook, the word Randall used was “painful.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the mayor said it would be an uneducated guess to estimate how much the village as a whole suffered financially. He did add, however, that some of the bigger businesses in town may have lost revenue in the tens of thousands of dollars each.

“I walked into Hannaford last night; their ice cream cooler’s all but empty. All of that stuff had to be removed,” Randall said. “Had to dispose of it, every business.

“Talking with at least one of large hotel operators, the numbers they suffered were fairly severe,” Randall continued. “I would say from the low tens (of thousands) to at least moderate tens (of thousands), one of the larger hotels (lost),” he added. “(They were) refunding monies to their guests.”

Randall also said the blackout likely cost the village itself, by way of overtime for close to 50 workers who logged extra hours. He said he would know numbers on that cost when the current payroll period concludes.

“Almost every one of the village employees were called out, between the water, highway, electric, police, and fire departments,” he said.

Randall also mentioned that it was discussed Tuesday how village merchants may not be able to collect on business interruption insurance claims, as many policies specify outages are only covered if the time period exceeds 24 hours. The village’s main power line was restored after about 19 hours.