Video Offers Tips to Make O&R's Outage Map Work Better for You
Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc. (O&R) today released a new video designed to provide its New York and New Jersey electric customers with more detailed information than ever before about the impact that storm-related electric service interruptions have on the company’s electric system and its customers.
The video focuses on offering useful tips that enable customers to easily navigate O&R’s interactive Outage Map and capture much more of the detailed outage information contained there. A program guide also is available to supplement the video. That is located on O&R’s Outage Map. Go to the upper left corner of the Outage Map where the word “HELP” with a question mark “?” is located. Press that word and the program guide appears.
The Outage Map is an online map of the O&R service territory that marks the location of individual power outages with color-coded icons. Those symbols’ colors reflect the range of numbers of customers within each outage. The Outage Map also provides estimated restoration times (ERTs) for outages.
The new 2-minute video drills down into the Outage Map’s design and provides a step-by-step, simple blueprint of the Outage Map’s basic functionality including:
- Menu. This section shows an overview of all power outages within O&R’s service area as well as information about the time the Outage Map was last updated.
- Search Tool. Customers can find up-to-date information about their outages by searching for a specific address on the search box.
- Map Tools. This section allows customers to view outages by location, county or municipality.
See the video:
O&R Vice President – Customer Service Janette Espino said, “The Outage Map is the customer’s best source of information during any type of storm event.’
She added, “This new video gives customers tips and information they need at their fingertips on how to use the Outage Map from wherever they are to make informed decisions.”
How to Report an Outage
If you experience a power outage, don’t assume that O&R automatically knows about it. You can report it and check to see when your lights will be back on through:
- Any web-based mobile device or computer at www.oru.com/ReportOutage.
- O&R’s mobile app from your iPhone, iPad or Android device – download via Apple Store or Google Play.
- Text messaging by texting “OUT” to 69678 (myORU) or
- A phone call to 1-877-434-4100.
About O&R
Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc. (O&R), a wholly owned subsidiary of Consolidated Edison, Inc., one of the nation’s largest investor-owned energy companies, is a regulated utility. O&R provides electric service to approximately 300,000 customers in southeastern New York State (where its franchise name is Orange & Rockland) and northern New Jersey (where it’s Rockland Electric Company) and natural gas service to approximately 130,000 customers in New York.