Out-of-town crews labor to restore power to Peco customers

David Grant and his team of 15 utility workers were on the scene Wednesday in Glenside, performing an aerial ballet with five bucket trucks as the linemen repaired a power line along Mount Carmel Avenue that had been knocked down by Hurricane Sandy.

"We're from Florida," Grant told Linda Lee, who had lost her power Monday night and who delivered a container of peanut butter cookies to the workers. "We're going to have your power on in a couple of hours."

Grant and his crew are among a contingent of 70 Gulf Power Co. workers who arrived Tuesday night in Philadelphia after a 1,100-mile drive from Pensacola. The journey took three days, longer than expected, because the convoy ran into the storm as it traveled north.

They got down to work to help Peco Energy Co. rebuild a distribution system devastated by the mighty storm. Sandy interrupted electrical service for more than half of Peco's 1.6 million customers, an unprecedented number of outages, and the restoration work will last into next week, said Mike Innocenzo, senior vice president of operations.

Peco said Wednesday that it had reduced total outages throughout its part of the region to 350,000, down from 485,000 a day earlier. South Jersey utilities reported similar progress.

"This is the biggest storm ever for Peco," Innocenzo said. The utility has deployed 3,500 people on the restoration effort, including 2,500 workers in the field, about 1,600 of whom are contractors or employees of other utilities who come here under the industry's mutual-assistance program.

For the out-of-town crews, who are called "foreign workers" in utility jargon, the journey is no holiday. They work 16-hour shifts - 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. They typically spend the night in suburban motels, doubled up in rooms, their meals catered in conference rooms or delivered to work sites in cardboard boxes.

When the job is done, in a few days or a few weeks, they will pack up and return to their families without so much as a tourist stop at Independence Hall.

"It's all business," said Grant, 45, whose Southern accent is as thick as honey. "We want to help because we need help ourselves when storms hit us."

This effort is not cheap. Peco picks up the tab for travel expenses and wages for the workers, many of whom are unionized and work on overtime after eight hours. Innocenzo said it was too early to tell how much Sandy would cost, but Peco spent $45 million recovering from Hurricane Irene last year, and Sandy was much bigger.

The utility likely will ask the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to charge customers for the restoration costs because storm emergency costs are recoverable, Peco spokesman Ben Armstrong said.

As Grant's Gulf Power team made its assessment of the damage on Mount Carmel Avenue on Wednesday, Gov. Corbett visited another Montgomery County restoration site on Limekiln Pike in Dresher, where a crew from Mississippi Power replaced two utility poles and a transformer that snapped off in high winds.

"I assume you have a little bit of practice with hurricanes?" Corbett said to Scott Cashwell, supervisor of the team based in Gulfport, Miss., which was devastated by Katrina in 2005.

Corbett was accompanied by Peco executives and Glenn Cannon, head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency. PUC chairman Robert F. Powelson and two other members of the PUC also joined the entourage and said they were keeping a close eye on the performance of utilities; many of them were sharply criticized last year after Irene struck.

Powelson said the PUC convened a nightly conference call with utility executives to get updated numbers on the outage recovery and wanted to make sure the power companies were properly deploying the out-of-state workers.

Peco received plaudits from regulators and industry evaluators for its response to Irene, when it restored power to 99 percent of the 511,000 customers who lost power within 72 hours of the storm.

But Innocenzo said Peco would not be able to match last year's performance this time. "This was a lot bigger storm," he said.

The utility now expects to have service restored to 80 percent to 90 percent of customers by Friday and 99 percent by Sunday. It expects final restoration by next Tuesday.

The utility restores high-priority customers first - public-safety providers, hospitals, and water-system pumping stations. An automated system then prioritizes outages by those that will restore service to the largest number of customers. Last in line are outliers or individual customers at the end of distribution lines.

Sometimes the utility restores service to an area only to discover smaller clusters of customers who are still without power - a "nested outage."

The Gulf Power crew in Glenside was repairing damage caused when a massive maple tree lost an 18-inch-in-diameter limb, knocking out the uppermost primary line with 13,200-volt service and shutting off power to 1,377 customers on the circuit, according to Frank Heleniak, a Peco engineer at the site.

A tree-trimming crew on Tuesday removed the damaged limbs, and other Peco workers cut down the damaged power lines, allowing the utility to isolate the outage by routing power to about 1,000 customers. But about 315 customers still had no service.

Tom Cassin, whose aging parents live in the neighborhood, said he had visited Mississippi after Katrina struck, so the damage here was small by comparison. Nevertheless, the outage had caused hardship in his family. His disabled father uses an electric stair lift, so he had been effectively immobilized since the storm hit.

"He's stuck on the second floor," he said.

But by 3:30 p.m., power was restored and Grant and his crew were dispatched to repair another downed wire in a place he had never heard of before - Jenkintown.

"We're good to go," he said.