Power Companies Revamp Mutual Aid

(Host) Snow this weekend knocked out power to millions across the eastern seaboard. After restoring power to about 13,000 customers in Vermont, Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power sent utility crews to Maine and Connecticut to help there.    

Providing mutual aid is something utility companies do on a regular basis. Vermont saw that first hand after Tropical Storm Irene. But as VPR's Nina Keck reports, with the number of severe storms increasing, power companies are trying to get smarter about getting and giving help.

(Keck) Officials from more than a dozen northeastern utility companies met in Killington recently to talk about crisis management. While power points about staging areas, emergency communications, customer service and the best way to distribute 800 bagged lunches to linemen may sound dry, Bill Chant says it's critical information for any utility.

(Chant) "It's a nightmare if you don't have the plans in place."

(Keck) Chant is a supervisor with Hydro One - Ontario's largest utility. He says any time one utility seeks aid from another, logistics can quickly become the mother of all headaches.

(Chant) "Where you're going to put people, where you're going to feed them, how you're going to fuel the  trucks. All that disaster planning has to happen before you have the event. Because if you wait for the event, you're sunk."

(Keck) Chant says the 1998 ice storm, the same one that hammered northern Vermont, was a wakeup call for his company.

(Chant) "We did a phenomenal job at the restoration. We did not do such a good job in telling people what we were doing and explaining how it was getting done and when it would be brought to closure. We learned."

(Keck) Sharing those lessons is part of the mission of the Northeast Mutual Assistance Group, which includes 19 utility companies from Connecticut to New Brunswick. They're like the neighbors you call when you're out of sugar.

(Desautels) "Typically, if any one utility requests assistance we'll facilitate a conference call and get all the members on so all utilities have a chance to participate."

(Keck) Dean Desautels manages Emergency planning at National Grid, one of the largest utilities on the east coast.   

(Desautels) "What we try to prevent is that if one utility is impacted first, say with a hurricane. If the coastal utilities are impacted first we try to prevent them from taking all the resources and not being able to allocate ones to utilities who are impacted the next day."

(Keck) While utilities have provided mutual aid for years, Desautels says they've ramped up efforts to fine-tune the process. The annual meeting, for instance, used to last a couple hours. Now it's held over two days so members can share best practice methods in finer detail. Christine Rivers, a spokesperson for CVPS says crisis response has become almost like an art.

(Rivers) "People have sort of developed action items and to do lists for mutual assistance for coordinating logistics - for planning chiefs, communications chiefs, resource coordination chiefs. You start to learn that there is sort of a formula to every storm.  Not the type of damage you'll see, but responding to that storm."

(Keck) Scott Massie coordinates emergency response for CVPS. Tropical Storm Irene was by far the biggest crisis  the utility has ever faced. 200 outside line crews - some from as far as Kansas and Missouri - came to help. After assessing CV's response to the storm, Massie says there were some logistical hiccups - central Vermont doesn't have a lot of big hotels, he says which made organizing and transporting work crews more challenging.  But he says thanks to long range weather forecasts, they did have time to plan.

(Massie) "I think we did really well with getting resources on our property in advance of the event - that was a huge thing and we told our contractors before the storm to bring in off road vehicles - whatever they have for off road equipment and that turned out to be a blessing because we had a lot of off road equipment that allowed us to get into some of these areas where we couldn't' access the roads."

(Keck) Massie says they learned from Irene, just like every emergency. And with the increasing number of severe storms, those lessons will quickly to put to the test in Vermont and elsewhere.  

For VPR News, I'm Nina Keck.