East Coast outages could last most of the week

JESSICA GRESKO, MATTHEW BARAKAT

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — From North Car­olina to New Jer­sey, 2 mil­lion peo­ple with­out elec­tric­ity are ask­ing the same ques­tion: Why will it take so long to get the lights back on?

Nearly three full days after a severe sum­mer storm lashed the East Coast, util­i­ties warned that many neigh­bor­hoods could remain in the dark for much of the week, if not beyond.

Friday’s storm arrived with lit­tle warn­ing, so util­ity com­pa­nies have had to wait days for extra crews trav­el­ing from as far away as Que­bec and Okla­homa. And the top­pled trees and power lines often entan­gled bro­ken equip­ment in debris that must be removed before work­ers can even get started.

Adding to the urgency of the repairs are the sick and elderly, who are espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble with­out air con­di­tion­ing in the swel­ter­ing triple-digit heat. Many sought refuge in hotels or basements.

Offi­cials feared the death toll, already at 22, could climb because of the heat and wide­spread use of gen­er­a­tors, which emit fumes that can be dan­ger­ous in enclosed spaces.

At the Spring­vale Ter­race nurs­ing home and senior cen­ter in Sil­ver Spring, Md., gen­er­a­tors were brought in to pro­vide elec­tric­ity, and win­dow air con­di­tion­ers were installed in large com­mon rooms to offer respite from the heat and darkness.

Res­i­dents using walk­ers strug­gled to nav­i­gate doors that were sup­posed to open auto­mat­i­cally. Nurses had to throw out spoiled food, some­times over the loud objec­tions of res­i­dents who insisted their melt­ing ice cream was still good.

The lack of power com­pletely upended many daily rou­tines. Super­mar­kets strug­gled to keep gro­ceries from going bad. Peo­ple on per­ish­able med­ica­tion called phar­ma­cies to see how long their med­i­cine would keep. In Wash­ing­ton, offi­cials set up col­lec­tion sites for peo­ple to drop off rot­ting food. Oth­ers had week­end cook­outs in an attempt to use their food while it lasted. And in West Vir­ginia, National Guard troops handed out food and water and made door-to-door checks.

When it comes to get­ting the power run­ning again, all util­i­ties take a top-down approach that seeks to get the largest num­ber of peo­ple back online as quickly as possible.

First, crews repair sub­sta­tions that send power to thou­sands of homes and busi­nesses. Next, they fix dis­tri­b­u­tion lines. Last are the trans­form­ers that can restore power to a few cus­tomers at a time.

In Great Falls, Va., just out­side Wash­ing­ton, patent attor­ney Patrick Muir found out first­hand who was high on the pri­or­ity list. The area is sparsely pop­u­lated and wealthy, with man­sions spread across secluded, wooded lots. Muir had been raid­ing water bot­tles from his pow­er­less office to sup­ply his home, which is on a well that was not work­ing. His 8-year-old daugh­ter spoke hope­fully of a beach trip to escape the heat. Dad said it was under consideration.

“Great Falls always seems to be the first to go down and the last one to come back up,” Muir said.

A Safe­way super­mar­ket try­ing to stay open with a lim­ited power sup­ply handed out free bags of dry ice. But after two days of tem­per­a­tures in the 90s, the air inside was stale. Shop­ping carts with spoiled food, buzzing with flies, sat out­side the store.

At a CVS phar­macy, Mahesh Tickle did the best he could. He had no cash reg­is­ter, so he made change with loose bills and coins stuffed inside a Ziploc bag. Tickle filled what pre­scrip­tions he could and fielded ques­tions from cus­tomers won­der­ing if med­ica­tions such as insulin had spoiled.

Some peo­ple said the destruc­tion over the week­end was rem­i­nis­cent of that caused by Hur­ri­cane Isabel in 2003 and Hur­ri­cane Irene in 2011.

Some backup util­ity crews arrived Sun­day in Mary­land, but many were not expected until some­time Mon­day. That’s because the storm arrived so quickly, unlike hur­ri­canes, which approach with sev­eral days of warn­ing and give out-of-state crews plenty of time to get into place.

After Isabel, it took elec­tric­ity sup­plier Pepco eight days to restore power to most of the 500,000-plus cus­tomers in Wash­ing­ton and the sur­round­ing areas. About 443,000 lost power at the peak of this storm, and restora­tion work will likely last into the weekend.

Last year, it took Bal­ti­more Gas and Elec­tric com­pany eight and a half days to restore power to all 750,000 cus­tomers who lost power dur­ing Hur­ri­cane Irene. This time, the power com­pany ini­tially con­fronted more than 600,000 peo­ple with­out power. It said restora­tion efforts will extend into the weekend.

BGE said in a let­ter posted on its web­site that it would take hun­dreds of thou­sands of man-hours to clear debris and work through out­ages. Crews are work­ing around the clock in 16-hour shifts.

“This type of wide­spread, exten­sive dam­age also com­pli­cates our abil­ity to quickly pro­vide accu­rate restora­tion times, espe­cially when orig­i­nal dam­age assess­ments are revised upon closer inspec­tion of the work required,” the let­ter said.

How­ever, Mary­land Gov. Mar­tin O’Malley has been blunt that the util­i­ties must work faster: “No one will have his boot fur­ther up Pepco’s and BGE’s back­sides than I will,” O’Malley said Sunday.

Pepco spokes­woman Myra Oppel said the dif­fer­ences between storms can be sig­nif­i­cant. Two storms could have the same num­ber of cus­tomers with out­ages, but the root of the prob­lem could be downed wires in one sit­u­a­tion and downed poles in another. But repair­ing poles takes a lot longer.

As a result, the length of time it takes to restore power “depends on what dam­age has occurred, not the num­ber of out­ages,” Oppel said.

In the case of Fri­day night’s storms, crews are con­tend­ing with trees that have to be removed before crews can get to dam­aged infrastructure.

She said the fact that neigh­bor­ing states were also hard-hit meant many util­i­ties were com­pet­ing to get the same backup crews for help.

In Bal­ti­more County, Eveena Felder, a reg­is­tered nurse, had been rely­ing on air-conditioned pub­lic areas to keep cool dur­ing the day and a fan to help her fam­ily sleep.

“We’ve pur­chased a ton of bat­ter­ies, that’s where most of our money has gone,” Felder said. “Turn the fan on and keep still, don’t move, less energy.”

Offi­cials were espe­cially con­cerned about peo­ple in iso­lated rural areas.

In Green­brier County, W.Va., “they have no radio sta­tion. They have no TV sta­tion. They have no com­mu­ni­ca­tions because with­out power, they don’t have phones,” said Lt. Col. David Lester of the West Vir­ginia National Guard.

Back at the nurs­ing home, the cable was out as well, so in the com­mon rooms with gen­er­a­tor power the cen­ter played movies on old VHS tapes, includ­ing the 1932 clas­sic “Grand Hotel.”

Ninety-three-year-old Mar­garet Fos­ter and 95-year-old Helen Ofshar­ick passed the time outside.

“You wouldn’t want to live this way more than a day or so,” Fos­ter said. “There are sick peo­ple here, or peo­ple who don’t think too well. They need help.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.