James White said that as a child, his mother told him if he didn’t have anything good to say, he shouldn’t say anything at all.
Butwhen it came to Jersey Central Power & Light Co.’s efforts during Hurricane Irene, the East Brunswick township administrator said, “I just can’t help myself.”
While Public Service Gas & Electric (PSE&G), the township’s other electricity provider, had a contact who was able to provide information about where power outages were occurring in the township, when power would come back and when the power was actually back on, JCP&L sent “endless” fax transmissions featuring updates on the thousands of customers who had their service restored, White said.
But this lacked a key piece of information:
“Howmany ofmy residents are still without service?”
White said that JCP&L sent his calls to a call center in Reading, Pa. There, JCP&L representatives told him that they could not tell him what sections of town were without power, but that if he provided some addresses they could look it up.
“I’mnot in the utility business, but I think that’s a glitch in their system,” White said. “They were never able to tell us how many of our residents [were without power], where they were located or any type of timeframe as to when they were coming back.”
As other officials and residents across the state continue to vent the same frustration, JCP&L President Donald Lynch vowed to improve its communication efforts and to work to provide more specific information on power outages and restoration in the future.
“Thiswas 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 during a meeting with Greater Media Newspapers last week.
The company launched a massive response to what was expected to be a massive storm in the days leading up to Hurricane Irene’s Aug. 27-28 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 areas as far as West Virginia and Ohio. Hundreds of trucks filled staging areas at Livingston Mall for North Jersey customers and Six Flags Great Adventure for Central Jersey customers, ready for deployment after the storm.
JCP&L takes regular precautions as well, trimming trees as part of a maintenance program and spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” every year to improve and maintain infrastructure, Lynch said.
But Irene’s wind gusts of over 60 mph and immense rainfall onto already drenched soil caused millions in damage across the state and power outages for over two-thirds of JCP&L’s 1,097,078 customers.
“Itwas 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 high-voltage electricity into a lower voltage that could be sent to homes, were flooded. Over 1,000 circuits were affected by the storm, he said, and the company responded to 21,000 downed wires.
Local restoration efforts also faced many challenges, as crews couldn’t get to sites because of downed trees and flooded roads. With safety for its workers a No. 1 concern, sustained strong winds also kept aerial trucks from being sent out after the storm, 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 to 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. A service 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 in 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 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 that residents faced in having 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.”
Lynch said the company is reviewing its actions during Hurricane Irene and is looking to improve on future response, including steps like providing specific information on power outages instead of general faxes, and restructuring communications during storms.
“A storm this large, we learn a lot of things,” he said. “I personally pledge as president of the company to improve our communications.”