Recovery
How One Co-op Coped with Irene
FREDERICKSBURG, Va.—As soon as the first reports of power outages came into Rappahannock Electric Co-op’s offices on Aug. 27, the co-op switched into restoration mode, and it wasn’t long before substation technician Jamie Pitts was in the field, checking out damage.
Rappahannock Electric Co-op workers restore power from Hurricane Irene. (Photo By: Casey Hollins)
But Hurricane Irene’s twisting winds and driving rain threatened to create unsafe working conditions, so co-op officials recalled Pitts and his coworkers. That was only the beginning of the adventure.
“I didn’t think I was going to get home,” said Pitts, who lives in the small community of Sparta, about 45 miles north of Richmond, Va. “I had to cut four trees out of the road to try to get to my house. After the fourth tree, I said, ‘I’m going to stay at my mom and dad’s house.’”
In a nutshell, Pitts’ experience describes how the Fredericksburg, Va.-based co-op coped with one of the most challenging storms it has seen: Plan carefully, respond quickly, adapt to conditions and prepare to encounter the unexpected.
“It’s a team approach,” said Ron Harris, manager of engineering and power supply, who served as incident commander for Irene. “In a team approach, everyone has duties and assigned responsibilities associated with the restoration effort. The key to keep things running smoothly and, most importantly, safely, is effective communications.”
That’s particularly important for a sprawling co-op like REC, which serves parts of 22 counties from the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains to the tidal waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
While damage from Irene was not as widespread as Hurricane Isabel in 2003, REC had 29,000 outages at the height of the storm, many in hard-to-reach areas where the co-op serves only a handful of members per mile of line. Though the overall damage did not equate to Isabel, pockets of heavily damaged infrastructure matched or exceeded Hurricane Isabel’s impact.
More than 600 people were mobilized on various facets of the response, including about 195 contractors, right-of-way personnel and linemen from co-ops as far away as Kentucky and Tennessee.
“REC employees are not alone in this endeavor because we’re working with Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, our power supplier; other cooperatives and Dominion Virginia Power,” the major IOU in the state, Harris said. “Our restoration efforts are coordinated with the county emergency operations centers, highway departments, and federal, state and local agencies. That’s why I say it’s that total team approach.”
Click here to view a gallery of REC’s response to the storm
IN THE OFFICE
Like most co-ops, REC has an emergency restoration plan for weather-related disasters, which kicked into high gear when it became apparent that Irene would strike at least some part of its service territory.
An office conference room became a high- and low-tech war room, with streaming cable TV and a video-conference setup surrounded by sheets of paper with handwritten notes that lined the walls.
Co-op officials, including representatives of REC’s three district offices, met pre- and post-storm for a daily 4 p.m. assessment. “The room is full of concerned employees focused on one objective, which is to restore power to their members in a safe and efficient manner,” Harris said.
They chewed over information from a variety of internal and external sources, much of which came from REC’s central dispatch and operations center, where banks of monitors and computers resemble a smaller-scale version of NASA Mission Control.
Trucks get ready to roll at the Caroline County office of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. (Photo By: Brian Wolfe)
As Irene approached, REC had 120 rights-of-way and contract line crews pre-staged for action, Harris said. “We sent them home Friday [a day before Irene hit] to get clothes and everything they’d need for a week.”
Billy Carter, director of operational and construction services, coordinated operations from REC’s central dispatch and control center. He credited REC’s ability to send pings—short signals—to its meters, to pinpoint the scale and scope of outages. Effectively integrating technology systems with traditional human resources is the key to minimizing outages, he said.
There is an element of triage to dispatching linemen into the field, acknowledged Carter. REC has a limited amount of resources and needs to target them productively, so the ultimate call on where and when to send crews still is a human one.
“It can be a tough call sometimes,” said Carter, an ex-lineman who has been at REC for nearly 40 years. “We’re a co-op and we’re a not-for-profit, so we want to do as much as we can as efficiently as we can. But that’s what these systems allow us to do, so everybody benefits from better response, in the end.”
At the same time, REC adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to dealing with consumer members. Employees immediately transitioned into 12- to 16-hour work schedules, in addition to the already fully staffed contact center.
Many workers from other departments became temporary customer service representatives, manning the phone lines as outage reports started to come in around noon on August 27.
The co-op has an automated voice response system, as well as in-the-flesh reps; spillover calls go to the Minnesota-based Cooperative Response Center.
Through Aug. 28, about 36 hours after they started trickling in, REC registered 20,312 calls. That seems like a wave of queries, but Sterling Schoonover, manager of member services, said the co-op welcomes them. “We like hearing from the members because they can sometimes provide very useful information,” he said.
The co-op also went the extra mile in its internal and external communications, providing two and three updates daily to the news media, keeping its own employees informed and, by dint of good timing, launching its Facebook page the night before Irene struck.
REC quickly had 1,000 fans on Facebook, and Ann M. Lewis, director of communications and public relations, pointed to that as yet another way to keep members and community leaders updated.
IN THE FIELD
With 40 circuits out and more than 100 poles broken, line crews had a lot of work to do, especially in a seven-county area in REC’s eastern and southern portions, where they cut through thick brush and oak trees just to begin their restoration efforts.
Co-op workers in Virginia faced a tangle of downed wires, and broken poles and trees in dealing with Hurricane Irene's impact. (Photo By: Steven Johnson)
Case in point: along U.S. 17 in rural Essex County in the middle peninsula of Virginia, logging crews had created a quandary for REC line crews. Months ago, they harvested timber in a field off the road and left only a strip of hardwood trees on one side of the power lines.
That, according to first class lineman Kevin Houston, who was at the scene, represented an unintentional but serious mistake by denuding trees of protection. “When the winds came through, they had a chance to build up speed. When they hit that strip of hardwoods, they took the line down,” he said.
Houston, who worked through Isabel in 2003, said Irene’s damage was no less destructive, and pointed to the snapped poles and twisted line at Essex. He looked at a house under two trees, including one tree that came through 15 feet of the back of the house; fortunately, no one was injured.
“This line is my worst ever,” he said. “But people have been great. They see what we are up against and see us clearing the trees and understood the seriousness of the situation.”
Nearby, Dennis Taylor, who was by his own definition “bird-dogging” line crews, agreed that trees are an underappreciated foe. “Believe it or not, trees are the most dangerous thing you deal with. It’s not electricity. It’s mostly the trees. You just don’t know what they’re going to do, so that’s why we always emphasize safety first.”
After 40 years of experience at REC, Taylor, a first class serviceman, said he still gets a kick out of restoring power—in this case, for several hundred homes along the main road in Essex. “What’s really satisfying is when these other co-ops come in to help and you see how they work. The main thing is to treat them right. Take care of them, feed them, give them a good lunch … you’ve got to treat them right so they’ll want to come back.”
By the end of the day, Houston could report success along the road in Essex, and crews moved on to tackle the next incident.
That, Harris said, is another reflection of REC’s team approach to serving its members, and part of the reason that power is expected to be restored to just about all members six days after the storm.
“I really think that’s why we’ve been successful. With the team approach, the lines of communications are very clear and that’s an essential part of dealing with something of this magnitude.”
Tags: Hurricanes, Power Lines, Power Outages, Recovery