DPUC Hears Complaints, Solutions

At the height of the outages following the devastating storm that hit the area March 13, more than 65 percent of New Canaan was without power. Phones didn't work. Schools were closed for three days. While some roughed it with backyard grills and generators, many residents waited it out at nearby hotels.

"The events of March 13 through the rest of the week were pretty traumatic for New Canaan," First Selectman Jeb Walker told Commissioner John Betkoski and three other Department of Public Utility Control officials Wednesday night at the first in a series of five hearings on how Connecticut Light & Power and other utilities responded to the storm.

"A sense of lack of responsiveness is something we had to deal with," Walker said.  

Thirteen more local officials, electrical union representatives, and area residents went on to deliver their criticisms and offer suggestions for averting the next catastrophe in front of a full, if not packed, Town Hall auditorium (it is the middle of spring break for public schools after all).

John Unikas, business manager for IBEW Local 420, was one of three union members who testified that the power could have been restored two or three days earlier if CL&P had not restricted crews to 16-hour shifts. The utility had said it was necessary to do so for safety reasons, but Unikas argued that crews had worked 18 or 19 hours at a stretch in past emergencies.

"I'm in the lobby [of a hotel] reading the newspaper until 9 a.m... I'm being told to go to bed at 9 p.m." Unikas said of the work schedule after the storm. "What happened was absolutely outrageous."

He estimated that with about 200 two-man crews assigned to the job, the shorter shifts amounted to about 1,200 lost man-hours per day.  

New Canaan resident Christine Yang, whose 19-month-old relies on electricity to run life-preserving equipment, said her family was lucky the storm didn't knock out their power. But there was no warning when service to their home was taken down Tuesday morning so other parts of the network could be fixed, despite the family having filed a letter of necessity from their doctor with CL&P.

"We really didn't think or anticipate that we would need to move our daughter... Nobody reached out to us to tell us to make other plans," she said, explaining that without accurate information about when the power would be switched back on, she did end up taking her daughter to the hospital on the advice of local EMS.

David Jonker, New Canaan's Emergency Management Director, said the key to getting the most critical sites on the top of the list for power restoration was putting a CL&P supervisor in the town's Emergency Operations Center, which happened two days after the storm and only after Governor M. Jodi Rell had orchestrated a conference call between the power companies, chief elected officials, and emergency responders.

"They don't know us by address... they know us by circuits," Jonker said. He acknowledged that in the interest in returning service to as many customers as quickly as possible, the utility would automatically target the biggest circuits, but, "one of the priority sites in New Canaan was our waste water treatment plant—it was running on generator power—it's on a circuit that doesn't have very many people associated with it."
 
CL&P representatives were on hand Wednesday to absorb the criticism and spokesman Mitch Gross said the utility would pair company officials with local officials again in a similarly concentrated disaster, "that's an automatic."

As to the other concerns, Gross would only say that the company was conducting an internal after-action review and had filed its responses to the questions on the DPUC's docket, which includes inquiries about manpower policies and customer call center operations.

The regulators seemed to pay particular attention to the two ideas for policies they could set to help avoid mass outages in the future.

Arne Thune, an engineer who has been living and working in town since 1969, said the state and the town should encourage CL&P to put its wires underground (as oil and gas lines and water mains already are) as roads are repaved.

"It would be very easy to dig the trenches and put in electric lines [while the road was open]," Thune said. "We can start doing it little by little, so maybe 10 years from now or 15 years from now we'll have all our wires underground."

George Wendell, a member of the New Canaan Planning & Zoning Commission who was speaking in his private capacity, asked that the trees that most commonly fell and took down wires during the storm be identified and regulations be put in place to discourage planting of those varieties along roads and utility right-of-ways.

"Falling trees were the major problem here," Wendell said. "Both ends of my road were blocked for at least 12 hours, and one exit was only opened by a person who went at it with his own chainsaw."

The wires entangled in that downed tree, Wendell said, made the operation a dangerous proposition for a regular citizen.

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If you still want to give your input, the DPUC holds its next hearing on the storm response Monday, April 12, at Westport Town Hall at 6:30 p.m.