Slate Belt cell service improves; Gracedale generator fixed, Northampton County emergency official reports

The county office on aging is reaching out to clients who may be in cold, dark homes.

Cellphone service in the Slate Belt has dramatically improved and Northampton County won't have to deploy portable towers, county Emergency Management Director Bob Mateff said this morning from the Emergency Operations Center in Upper Nazareth Township.

Landline service is also improving in that area two days after Superstorm Sandy left the region, he said.

The generator that failed at Gracedale, the county nursing home in the township, has been fixed and residents have not been displaced or disturbed, he said. Power remains out, but National Guard troops did bring in portable lighting and heaters, which have yet to be needed, he said. There is a backup generator in the building, he said.

The county is working with PPL to put the nursing home on the priority list for power restoration, Mateff said. A PPL spokesman said Wednesday that health care facilities were the power company's priority. The spokesman couldn't immediately be reached this morning.

The county's director of aging is in the operations center and outreach is under way to older clients who may have been in cold, dark homes for three days now, Mateff said.

With more and more roads opening and the power companies getting ever closer to the point where more people in the county have power than don't, Mateff said the county effort is moving into the recovery phase. Municipalities are being asked to complete damage assessments to be compiled by the county in an effort to quantify the degree of damage to infrastructure and other key components, Mateff said.

Pockets of power have been restored and more county residents are beginning to return to normal routines, he said. And as more people get power, that makes them a resource for friends and family who don't have power, he said.

With PPL promising most customers power by Friday and Met-Ed making the same pledge for the end of the weekend, Mateff says he is confident they can meet their marks. With work to the west of the region wrapping up, those workers can be moved into the Lehigh Valley in a "marshaling of forces" to increase the pace of the line work here, he said. He said there's a small city of power trucks along Sullivan Trail on the site of where Nicos Polymers was destroyed by fire in August 2011 in Plainfield Township.

Some people who have power are losing it as the companies work to restore other customers, Mateff said, but that should be a short-term inconvenience.

Perspective is one thing Mateff said may be missing, working out of the operations center and living in a dark, 55-degree home. But that will come when most of the power is restored and he gets to weigh the events of the last several days, he said.

The tremendous structural damage of a flood is likely limited, he said, but as for electric and phone outages, this may be the worst storm ever in the county, he said.