Cablevision Subscribers Sue Over Hurricane Sandy Outages

Even as workers scramble to clean up the mess that Hurricane Sandy left in the Northeast two weeks ago, a legal mess is beginning to spill into the court system. Cablevision subscribers Jeffery and Irwin Bard filed a class-action lawsuit against the cable provider in New York Supreme Court this week, seeking restitution for television, telephone and internet outages caused by Sandy, according to court papers.

The suit, which alleges breach of contract and unjust enrichment, claims that Cablevision "continued to advertise falsely that it was providing services to its customers" even after the storm caused outages for its customers, and "could not restore services to many of its customers for days, or even weeks." Moreover, according to the complaint, Cablevision continued to issue bills for services it was unable to provide in the aftermath of the storm, and "instituted a secretive policy to offer 'customer credits’ only to customers who affirmatively and actively demanded rebates on a discretionary basis," rather than offer across-the-board rebates to its customers, even though it had access to which customers had lost power and for how long.