Colin McEnroe Show: After The Storm, Connecticut Slowest To Restore Power

EMAIL FROM ELISABETH:

Colin, this Halloween storm is actually the third storm since June in which many CL&P customers were without power for an extended period of time. About June 9, a heavy rain storm and with a tornado or a microburst brought down trees and did considerable damage near Candlewood Lake in New Milford and Brookfield, in Southbury and in Roxbury. Power was out for many people in those areas for between 5 and 7 days and many roads blocked by trees and wires.

Taking advantage of not being a professional, I have not checked the local newspapers for verification, but have relied upon my memory of the trouble that family and friends had.

Should the response to this storm be investigated along with the state-wide storms, Irene and Halloween?

Think about it: Repair downed wires and two poles.

1. Send a supervisor to evaluate the problem. Have the downed wires been made safe (shut off)? Identify the circuit, go to the switch that depowers it, open the switch and ground the circuit. How many poles are down? How many primaries (the wires at the top of the pole) are down? How many, and what type of transformers are on the pole? How many secondaries (the wires that run from the transformer and service each house) are down? How many service drops (the wires that run from the secondary to each house) are down? How about phone wires? Cable TV wires? Fire alarm wires? How many trees are down?

2. Find out where to get the proper poles, wires, and transformers and arrange to have them brought to the site. Coordinate with the tree cutters and phone and cable TV companies.

3. Make the wires safe, remove the broken poles, wires and transformers as necessary. Remove the fallen trees. Set the new poles. Attach the transformers, wires and telephone and cable equipment.

4. Remove the ground and go to the appropriate switch and close it.

Any one of these jobs could take hours. HOURS!

4. Repeat, hundreds of times.

Everybody quit bitching and suck it up. It's an unheard of natural disaster, for cryin' out loud, back to back with another one.

What's the problem? Not enough fire trucks or too many matches? It's not a question of not enough utility crews, it's a question of the trees not having been trimmed, which is often blocked by the towns. But the government is going to hammer CL&P about the former, because the unions are upset. The towns won't be asked to get out of the way.

EMAIL FROM DEB:

What really upset me is the CL&P excuse that the transmission lines were down (and apparently took the first 3 DAYS to fix). I grew up in this state and for most of my life these huge towers on interior lots had no trees anywhere near them, and I heard yesterday on your show, Dan Esty says trees had grown up around these. This would never happen with the prederegulation CL&P! They're trying to blame property owners and towns for tree issues when this was not the underlying problem. I hope this is properly investigated.

EMAIL FROM ELISABETH:

I am concerned about the coverage on your show and in other media about the response of the CL&P to the power outages caused by the Halloween Storm. Each time I listen to coverage, I become more and more irritated by many reporters and commentators who project having all the answers and how ept they would be in the place of the inept CL&P.

Although the analogy breaks down rapidly, the situation feels like a home owner asking the fire truck driver why it took him 10 minutes rather than 5 to reach the fire, while the house is burning down. After all, the home owner never takes more than 5 minutes to reach his house. At Wednesday evening's press briefing, the CL&P representative was asked why UI took less time to restore power than CL&P. The question was answered, but surely common sense and a bit of knowledge about Connecticut would have precluded the question from being asked. UI has fewer customers than CL&P, so there were fewer outages to begin with. UI's customers live along the shore where there was less snow, so fewer branches and trees fell.

The comparisons about CL&P's restoration being the worst in the region smack of apples and oranges to me. I would need more facts -- number of outages, number of trees down, depth of snow fall, amount of wind, how many workers were trapped at home by the storm -- before concluding that the comparison could made legitimately. My own experience is that the amount of snow varied greatly within a ten mile radius. At my home there were nearly 15 inches. Ten miles away at my mother's home less than 6. These differing amounts caused different amounts of tree damage.

The coverage that your show has provided is more balanced and the conversations more nuanced than the commercial media. I don't know if CL&P shoulda, coulda, woulda done things differently and better. And, so far, neither the coverage nor the CL&P has answered those shoulda, coulda, woulda questions. I don't think that this is the time to have those answers. The time to get those answers is when frustration is down, the pressure to have a sensational headline about this crisis for the 5, 6, and 11 o'clock news is off. It would be my hope that the hearings over the next several weeks and months may provide those answers.

Perhaps through your program or John Dankosky's, coverage of the legislative hearings can be given throughout...including all the boring details, not just stories of tremendous loss of property, personal harm, and inconvenience.

Thank you for your work and the work of the staff making your program interesting and informative.