WV Executive

An old Chinese proverb gives us two choices when the lights go out: curse the darkness or light a candle. At Allegheny Power, it’s never that simple—especially when nature throws a tantrum that shuts down electricity for more than 300,000 households and businesses.

Summer went long in the Northern Appalachians this year. It went so long that the leaves clinging to trees in October were still green. In fact, the forecast was so good—mild weather with highs in the 50s and a chance of showers—that Allegheny Power never hesitated to send dozens of electric line workers and damage assessors to hurricane-ravaged Florida. It’s what power companies do to help each other during a crisis.

But then winter arrived without warning on October 24 when a Canadian jet stream unexpectedly plunged southward, blasting arctic air into Hurricane Wilma’s lingering wet tropical breezes. Large parts of three states, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland, were hit with up to eight inches of snow.

Trees still dressed for summer couldn’t shed snow from their limbs. Branches broke. Whole trees were falling. When they went, they took power lines and utility poles with them. People in some mountain communities described the sound as crackling gunfire, like the first day of deer season. For Allegheny Power, it was more like war.

War is a good simile. In the power business, storms are the enemy that can strike from any direction, creating continuing havoc even as we field our “troops” to repair the system. We prepare, we drill, we anticipate—but each storm is unique in its destruction and each requires an all-out effort from our crews, working outdoors under the most difficult conditions, always aware that people are trapped in cold and darkness until we win the war, battle by battle.

Darkness Falls

Let me take you behind the front lines in late October, and you’ll see what I mean. At 2 a.m. on October 25, John Shaner, Allegheny Power’s restoration and emergency preparedness manager, got the call. He was awake anyway because he could see the signs. Even at his home in the foothills of the Alleghenies, the snow was falling heavy and fast. The forecast had suggested there might be snow at elevations above 1,500 feet, but this was lower. He knew there would be outages, and a lot of them given the state of the trees.

He was right. The call was from our Operations Center. So far, about 10,000 of Allegheny Pow- er’s 1.5 million customers were without power. That wasn’t an unusual number of outages for a storm—normally not enough to declare an emergency—but based on past experience and the rate at which the outage calls were climbing, it was enough to activate Allegheny Power’s Incident Management Team and put our crisis management plan into operation.

Shaner was in the office 20 minutes later.

The Incident Management Team is like a general’s staff. There are representatives from all the relevant units, except that instead of infantry, artillery and intelligence offi cers, there are Operations, Supply Chain, Damage Assessment, Customer Service and Media Relations representatives. Their most potent weapons? The ability to track and assess information as it pours in and then transfer crews from any one of Allegheny Power’s 59 local service centers to the places they’re needed most.

More than 700 line workers maintain Allegheny Power’s 72,000 miles of wire. Even with some in Florida on October 25, there were enough at their home service centers to handle emergencies and cover anything that might pop up. But the damage from this storm was widespread. An area the size of Switzerland, nearly 16,000 square miles of Allegheny Power’s 30,000 square miles were affected. Shifting crews around wasn’t going to be enough when more than half of the territory was pummeled.

Meanwhile, outage calls were pouring into Allegheny Power’s Customer Service Center in Fairmont, West Virginia—which is exactly what Allegheny Power wants. When a customer picks up the phone and dials 1-800-ALLEGHENY, the call goes to a sophisticated, interactive voice recognition system at the Fairmont Customer Service Center. The computer records the customer’s phone number, notes the service address and feeds the information into our computerized outage management system.

Using the service addresses as a guide, the system determines which circuits are affected and how many customers on each circuit are without power, which allows it to offer the calling customer an approximate time their power might be restored. The information also provides valuable clues about where a wire might be down or a breaker tripped. In heavily wooded rural areas—most of Allegheny Power’s territory—even a few calls can help pinpoint the damage and save a lot of tromping through the forest looking for the source of an outage.

Call Flooding In

4:30 a.m. on October 25, more than 20,000 customers were without power and a number of our service centers were opening for round-the-clock operations. The opening of the service centers plays a crucial role in Allegheny Power’s response to many emergencies. The centers are not staffed 24 hours a day. Instead, on-call line crews for each service center are alerted and dispatched by a centralized dispatching center when the problems facing our system are limited or contained.

When we know a situation is taking on cata- strophic proportions, we open service centers, calling in every available line worker and em- ployees specially trained for other duties. Some work the service center’s computers and phones to get our crews to trouble spots quickly. Others serve as scouts and damage assessors, patrolling suspected problem areas in search of downed wires or damaged equipment.

So in the early hours of October 25, everyone was already moving into position and tackling their assignments. But Shaner knew it was not going to be enough. At the Operations Center, he was on the phone, reaching out for help. First, he called in the contractors that keep Allegheny Power’s thousands of miles of right of way free from dangerous trees. Then he called neighbor- ing electric utilities to ask for mutual assistance.

Mutual assistance is the term electric utilities use for the help they give each other during emergencies. Allegheny Power belongs to a number of mutual assistance groups. Membership creates an obligation, whenever reasonable, to provide whatever aid another member company requests during an emergency. Within a couple of hours of the request for help, nearby utilities and the tree services had supplied 95 additional personnel, more than making up for the employees Allegheny had sent to Florida.

By noon on October 25, Allegheny had already restored power to 51,000 customers—but 115,000 were still without electricity, and the onslaught wasn’t over. Snow kept coming. There was no doubt there would be new outages.

The outage calls continued to flow in to the Customer Service Center, which had shifted into emergency mode, not responding to billing or service initiation inquiries that are part of its normal routine. Only outage calls were being handled, and at a very high rate. Before the day was over on October 25, the center had taken 96,000 calls—85,000 more than the average for a day. At its peak, the call volume hit 8,000 calls per hour.

When the sun went down on October 25, the first full day of the storm, power had been restored to more than 89,000 Allegheny Power customers, but 110,000 were still without power and new outages were still being reported. The challenge was serious. There were still more than 5,300 cases of trouble: downed wires, broken poles, burned out transformers and tripped breakers, and that was just what Allegheny Power knew about. In the mountain forests, far from most roads and certainly far from any that had yet been cleared of snow and fallen trees, there were lines down.

Another issue faced the company that night. The 275 employees of the Customer Service Center could keep the facility up and running all night, in spite of many being without power at home themselves. But work on the actual power lines is dangerous, especially at night, and most of the line crews were at their work time limits. Line workers are limited to 16 hours of work in any 24-hour period. Allegheny Power’s policy on safety is uncompromising. Employees at their maximum hours had to go home—but more help was on the way.

By the morning of October 26, the ranks of mutual assistance workers were swelling, growing by more than 300. Before the day was out, the number working to restore power rose to 2,254, including 1,000 Allegheny Power employees, 748 utility and contractor line workers and 500 tree contractors.

The new day also brought a short, but welcome break in the weather. Allegheny Power’s three-pronged damage assessment plan calls for three types of reconnaissance: electronic, ground and air. Aerial reconnaissance, an absolute necessity given the terrain in much of our territory, had been hampered by poor visibility and a low ceiling of clouds. Once the weather broke, to make up for lost time, we put not only our own helicopter, but a second, contracted chopper into the sky. The information they transmitted back to the Operations Center revealed substantial damage, but also made it clear what repairs would do the most good most quickly.

Part of our service restoration protocols call for a sort of power-line triage. Outage conditions creating safety hazards are dealt with first. Line crews then focus on the big transmission lines that carry power to the distribution systems and substations covering whole towns and cities. Hospitals, police departments and other services essential to health and safety are a high priority. Distribution lines serving neighborhoods are next. Finally, Allegheny moves on to restoring power to residential streets and homes. This way, the company restores the largest number of customers first.

With our air wing operating and reinforcements on the ground, we were able to restore electricity to half of all customers who lost power by the night of October 26, 48 hours after the storm had begun.

Back to Power

We declared victory just days later on November 2 when power was restored to the last customer affected by the storm.

The October 2005 outage event was the worst in Allegheny Power history. When it was over, power had been restored to 310,850 households and businesses, about 20 percent of Allegheny’s total customers, in a little more than a week. Most, 190,861, were in West Virginia.

As we fought our “war,” Allegheny Power handled more than 7,000 individual cases of trouble, replacing 218 broken utility poles and 228 distribution transformers. Our crews repaired or replaced 8,752 spans of wire and made 3,365 other repairs.

The vast majority of our customers who lost service during the storm shrugged off the inconvenience, never doubting that their lights would come back on. They were right. Their patient confidence was a boost to the many heroic utility workers who leave their own homes and families, many without power themselves, to bring light and warmth to the three million people served by Allegheny Power.