By Allison Perrine
NEW JERSEY – Many Two River area residents sat in the dark, frustrated, without power, for almost a week in the hot summer days following Tropical Storm Isaias that hit the Jersey Shore Aug. 4.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as flipping a switch to turn the lights back on.
About 800,000 of the 1.1 million customers Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) serves were without power the day of the storm, according to Clifford B. Cole, senior communications representative with JCP&L. Though Isaias only lasted a few hours in the late morning and early afternoon, the storm left a considerable amount of damage that required nearly 9,000 crew members from JCP&L and elsewhere to repair.
“Our folks have told us that it rises to the level of (Super Storm) Sandy, the damage that they saw out there,” said Cole.
According to JCP&L, power is not restored at random. The first step in the process is to safely assess what the damage is, Cole said. During this storm, a large number of “very large trees” came down against electric equipment. Winds also downed utility poles and power lines.
“A lot of these wires were still energized, so those are the hazards that folks have to go out and safely assess before we can even get the line workers into the areas,” said Cole.
After the damage is assessed, workers begin the service restoration process; critical care facilities and hospitals sit at the top of the list. After that comes customers in the areas with the most outages, followed by consumers who are individually impacted. Individual outages can be frustrating, Cole said. These houses may be attached to specific circuits that others are not, or there may be issues with the home itself.
“There’s so many variables that go into it,” said Cole. “And when you have 800,000 customers out, our crews are working around the clock to restore that power which they did since the storm departed.” About 85 percent of residents had their power restored by the end of the day Aug. 7; the remaining consumers had their power restored by midnight Aug. 10.
A few counties in New Jersey were hit harder than others, including Morris, Monmouth, Ocean and Union counties, Cole said.
Understanding the process doesn’t necessarily make going without power any easier to deal with when the days are hot and the Wi-Fi is down. Middletown resident Andrew Palmer said his power was out for three full days.
“We had to dispose of virtually everything in our fridge, not just food but even vital medications for a member of my household that are required to be refrigerated,” said Palmer. “The immediate boredom and the heat are easy to complain about, but it reached a point that could’ve been potentially very dangerous.”
Palmer also noted that while it may be “easier said than done,” he feels state and local governments, “along with the massive utility companies,” could have done more to prepare for a scenario like this.
While individuals suffered, in many areas whole municipalities were affected.
In Shrewsbury Borough, 1,333 residents – 62 percent of the borough – were without power as of Aug. 5, said Mayor Erik Anderson. As of Aug. 9, there were still about 30 homes without power.
“I fully appreciate that it is beyond frustrating for our residents who are going into day 6 without power. This is simply unacceptable,” Anderson said. He added once the situation passed, the borough would try to identify the areas in town that lose power more frequently than others and why they take the longest to restore.
Shrewsbury resident Ann Marie Van Pelt said her power was restored two days after the storm on Thursday. Some of her neighbors weren’t as lucky, she said.
“It is very apparent that FirstEnergy was very unprepared for this storm. Everyone knew it was coming; however, FirstEnergy was not proactive. It appears FirstEnergy took a wait-and-see attitude. This is very unfortunate for their customers,” she told The Two River Times.
Van Pelt also shared concerns about the company’s failure to communicate with their customers, noting that the available restoration information “was estimated and generalized” for the area with the same date and time listed – 11:30 p.m. Aug. 11.
“How can they estimate anything if the cause is pending investigation and no one has been dispatched?” she said. “FirstEnergy knows nothing about what is happening in our area. They are headquartered in Akron, Ohio. And none of their call centers are in our area.”
In Fair Haven, many in town did not have power for several days due to five circuits being disrupted from the storm. As of Aug. 7, there were 2,003 residents without power primarily due to tree damage to high voltage lines that feed one of the borough’s substations. A day later, Aug. 8, there were 803 residents without power due to a damaged distribution circuit breaker.
“Tropical Storm Isaias has caused extensive damage on a scale somewhere between Sandy and Irene. The damage from Isaias is different from Sandy in that Sandy effected the Distribution System and Isaias has ravaged the Transmission system,” Mayor Ben Lucarelli said Aug. 7. “Although we do have numerous issues with the local distribution system many of us will have power restored without seeing a truck.”
U.S. Rep. Frank J. Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) issued a statement Aug. 7 blasting JCP&L for its “abysmal” response to power outages from Tropical Storm Isaias. In a letter to FirstEnergy president and CEO Charles Jones and JCP&L president Jim Fakult, Pallone shared his frustrations.
“This is simply unacceptable, especially given summer temperatures and the fact that many people are working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Pallone wrote in the letter. “It is particularly egregious that JCP&L is once again failing to communicate with its customers in any meaningful way. The company is simply not sharing enough information with customers that they can use to plan accordingly for the coming days. The company’s failure to communicate in real time with meaningful, accurate information has been an ongoing problem and only seems to get worse with each passing storm season.”
There are ways for residents to wait out a loss of power in comfort, but they come at a price.
Glen Koedding, president of Green Sun Energy in Middletown, said he started seeing an uptick in generator sales about a month after the pandemic struck. More people are working and learning remotely while also stocking up on food which he believes contributed to the increase in sales.
“Literally the day that the power went out on Tuesday, our phones started lighting up,” he said. About 1,000 phone calls have come in over the past week with questions and inquiries about new generators, and over 200 online requests have come in for new generators. The first 121 online requests were made on Wednesday alone, he said, the day after the storm. And on average, Green Sun Energy has sold about three generators a day so far and almost all of the contracts are being done over the phone.
The company started investing more into high-end software when the pandemic struck that allows them to conduct a remote analysis of the house. There are satellite pictures dating back to March and April of this year, whereas Google is about “a year or so” behind, Koedding said.
“We can pretty much size the whole property in about 20 minutes on a phone call with a really high level of accuracy,” he said.
While there’s no way to completely prevent power outages from happening, FirstEnergy conducts annual efforts to keep trees from causing as many outages as possible. JCP&L works with its customers to prune or cut down trees in its right-of-way that could be problematic in a storm. The company has had some success in doing so, Cole said, but has also had some pushback.
“When these storms happen, we can’t control everybody’s vegetation in the entire state,” Cole said, “but we do have a system in place where we trim back and remove trees throughout the course of the year to try and mitigate the situation.”
Before storms or other severe weather forecasts, FirstEnergy companies activate a formal readiness plan to ensure there are plenty of crew members prepared and available to handle the damage, according to JCP&L’s website. Additional linemen, dispatchers and other field personnel are put on alert should they be needed as well. The number of customer service staff is also increased to handle the increase in call volume.
Cole advised that when storms occur, individuals must be safe and should there be downed wires or outages, call FirstEnergy or visit its website to report the incident.
The article originally appeared in the August 20 – 26, 2020 print edition of The Two River Times.
