ULSTER COUNTY, N.Y. -- A hearing was held regarding the massive power outages that left hundreds of thousands of people in the Hudson Valley without power earlier this year. Homes lost power for prolonged periods after two severe storms in February.

Assemblyman Kevin Cahill is the Chair of the Assembly Energy Committee and he oversaw the meeting at Ulster County Community College. Cahill says by working with utility companies, they can hopefully reduce the amount of time people are without power and better prepare for future storms.

"Just one utility is expecting the bill to be over $20 million that they will then go back to the rate payers and ask them to pay for dealing with these two storms earlier this year. In addition to that, we've seen extended power outages where they should not have occurred," Cahill said.

"We think that we did a very good job in not only restoring outages quickly to our customers but also communicating to our customers, municipal figures and our state regulators, there's certainly things that we're going to look at to see how we might be able to perform better in the future," said John Maserjian, Central Hudson Gas and Electric Spokesman.

Representatives from the Public Service Commission, Consolidated Edison, Orange and Rockland Utilities, NYSEG and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers also testified at the hearing.