Downed trees, flooded roads added to challenge of restoring power to 750,000+ customers W hen more than 750,000 customers were left in the dark after Hurricane Irene, the president of Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) said the company could have done a better job of shedding light on the situation for powerless residents and municipalities.
During a meeting with Greater Media Newspapers editors and writers, JCP&L President Donald Lynch said that the company could have worked harder to keep residents and municipality leaders informed of power outages and restorations in the wake of Hurricane Irene.
“This was so broad and so wide that while we were attacking this storm, I think we fell a little bit short in letting our towns and municipalities know exactly where we were working, what we were doing,” Lynch said .
The company launched a massive response to what was expected to be a massive storm in the days leading up to Hurricane Irene’s landfall in New Jersey, Lynch said.
More than 4,000 employees and contractor workers from JCP&L and its parent company, FirstEnergy, arrived in the state in preparation for the storm, coming from as far as West Virginia and Ohio.
Hundreds of trucks filled staging areas at Livingston Mall for northern New Jersey customers and at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township for central New Jersey customers, ready for deployment after the storm.
But Irene’s wind gusts of more than 60 mph and immense rainfall — 10 inches in some locations — onto already drenched soil caused millions in damage across the state and power outages for more than twothirds of JCP&L’s 1,097,078 customers.
“It was an extraordinary storm, the largest storm we’ve ever seen,” Lynch said.
Irene hit JCP&L hard, Lynch said. Seven JCP&L substations, which convert highvoltage electricity into a lower voltage that could be sent to homes, were flooded. More than 1,000 circuits were affected by the storm, Lynch said, and the company responded to 21,000 downed wires.
Local restoration efforts also faced many challenges, as crews couldn’t get to sites be- cause of downed trees and flooded roads, Lynch said.
But with nearly 70 percent of customers restored in 48 hours and almost 83 percent of customers restored in 72 hours, operationally speaking, Lynch said, JCP&L had a strong response.
The problem for JCP&L, Lynch said, was in communicating this information to residents suffering power outages and their township leaders.
JCP&L has an order in which it works to restore service, Lynch said. Emergency calls get first priority, followed by critical care facilities like hospitals and police stations, and finally from the largest outages to the smallest outages.
To restore power to specific areas, Lynch said power must first be restored to the substations, towers and distribution poles that work to bring power to towns and local neighborhoods.
Aservice wire to an individual house, as such, will be the last item to receive attention from crews.
“We could have put that wire up on Day One, but you wouldn’t have had any power coming,” Lynch said. “The fact of the matter is with a storm this large, it’s going to take time to get that power back to the individual customer.”
It was in trying to explain this system to residents and officials that JCP&L fell short, Lynch said.
“I think we failed to get out to our towns the amount of damage and where specifically we were working to restore their towns,” Lynch said. “We may have not have been in their town, but what we are doing is restoring the network that feeds their town. So we are picking up customers in their town, but they don’t see us there.”
Lynch said he understands the frustrations residents faced in seeing their power out for so long, only to be quickly fixed almost a week later.
“I certainly understand the frustration of people,” Lynch said. “We depend on electricity, and that’s our job to provide customers with the electricity they need to operate their businesses, their homes and their personal lives. We take that commitment seriously.”
He said the company is undergoing a review of its response to Hurricane Irene and will work to provide more specific power outage and restoration information to affected residents in future disasters.
“We failed in that regard,” Lynch said. “I personally pledge as president of the company to improve our communications.”