Wonder why storm left you in the dark so long?

When the lights went off at William and Colette Manker’s Olympia-area house in mid-morning Thursday, Jan. 19, the Mankers and their three children hoped it would be a short interruption, an adventure in coping that would challenge their imaginations and sharpen their appreciation for the services they usually take for granted.

But it would be more than four and a half days before the Mankers got their power back, and then not for long. Their electricity, provided by Puget Sound Energy, would be interrupted twice more that week. Before the lights came on and stayed on late Wednesday, Jan. 25, nearly a week had elapsed since their lights first flickered and then went dark.

The Mankers and their neighbors were among the last 5,000 or so PSE customers to get their power restored, according to statistics and timelines provided by PSE.

“It’s easy for us to say that, looking at the overall numbers, and say we did a good job, but if you’re still in the dark, that doesn’t matter,” said PSE spokeswoman Gretchen Aliabadi.

In the coming weeks, the utility will be analyzing just what happened in mid-January and how they can improve their response and prevention plans.

The Mankers said they understood how Mother Nature had dealt the Puget Sound area a bad hand. But as the days passed they began wondering why their power was still off. Was there something that PSE could have done better to put their household and the 300 households in their neighbor back to normal?

“It’s not as if we lived way back in the woods somewhere,” said William Manker. The Mankers’ house and those of their neighbors are within earshot of I-5. “We’re right across the freeway from Cabella’s,” he said referring to the huge sporting goods superstore.

And their street wasn’t blocked by downed power lines or fallen trees. The post office delivered their mail without a single day’s interruption.

During the outage, they tried to heat their home with their fireplace without much effect. “I bought all the firewood I could find, and I even went to Home Depot and bought framing lumber just to feed the fire.”  When the weather turned sunny and warmer outside, they threw open the windows to bring in the warmer air outside.

They spent a few hours at friends’ homes that had heat, but they didn’t want to impose too long. They cooked over the fire, trying to use up their stock of refrigerated and frozen food before it spoiled, but in the end, they discarded what they estimated was $400 worth of food.

When all was done, they even fell short of the $50 bill reduction the PSE promised customer whose power had been cut for 120 hours or more. The fine print, said William Manker, said that powerless period had to be uninterrupted.

Their time in the dark had twice been broken by a few hours when they were back on the grid.

The Mankers aren’t the only ones asking what happened during and after the storms, how well PSE coped with the outages and how the utility could have done better. PSE’s own Facebook pages and The News Tribune’s and The Olympian’s online story comments were filled with messages from PSE customers puzzled why there were still in the dark after so long.

Given a little distance from the storms, here’s what we know now.

Just how big were the storms’ effects?

Final figures show that during the weeklong period, the utilities in the region saw more than 500,000 homes and businesses without power. Puget Sound Energy, the region’s largest utility with 1.1 million electric customers from the Canadian border to Lewis County, was the hardest hit, both in raw numbers and the proportion of its customers whose power was interrupted.

PSE, whose territory includes more rural and suburban forested areas than the other two large electric utilities in the region, Tacoma Power and Seattle City Light, had to restore power to 457,000 customers.

Peninsula Light Co., which serves Gig Harbor and the Key Peninsula, saw only 3,500 of its 30,300 customers without power. Jonathan White, director of customer services for Peninsula, gave credit to the utility’s buried lines. Peninsula now has 67 percent of its wires underground.

At any one time, the greatest number of PSE customers who were simultaneously off the grid was 270,000 at 10 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 19.

The snowstorm that began that week interrupted relatively few customers on Wednesday, Jan. 18. PSE’s figures show some 20,000 customers out at 6 p.m. that day. As freezing rain began falling early Thursday and overburdened tree limbs began falling on power lines, the numbers quickly mounted. By 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 19, some 184,000 homes and businesses were dark.

“This storm was unusual because it delivered three punches: the snow, the freezing rain and then wind nearly a week later,” said PSE spokesman Roger Thompson.  

“The usual big power interruption in this area is a big windstorm that lasts a couple of hours or at most half a day and then is gone,” he said.

At the peak of the crisis on Jan. 19, 48,200 of Tacoma Power’s 169,000 customers were without electricity, said Nora Doyle, a Tacoma Power spokeswoman. By the end of Jan. 20, that number had been reduced to 2,750. By Jan. 25, Tacoma Power had restored all but a handful of customers who had issues with their own service lines between the pole and their homes.  

How did these storms compare to others historically?

Though their effects were substantial, they fell short of several other historic storms.

During the Hanukkah Eve wind storm of 2006, gale-force winds slammed the Puget Sound area on Dec. 14 and Dec. 15. In PSE’s nine-county service area, 750,000 customers were without power. In the whole region, including areas served by other utilities, some 1.2 million households and businesses had their power cut off.

In the Inauguration Day windstorm of 1993, some 750,000 power customers in the Puget Sound area suffered outages. The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 also was more serious as measured by the percentage of customers who lost their connection to the power network.

What areas were hit the worst?

South King, Pierce and Thurston counties suffered the most damage to the electrical system.

North of Interstate 90, the damage was more snow-related than ice-caused. Thurston County, where the Mankers live, suffered proportionally the most. An estimated 50 percent of the transmission lines, the lines that carry power from the dams and power plants where the power is generated to local substations where it is distributed to homes and businesses in South King and Pierce counties, were affected by outages. In Thurston County, some 90 percent of PSE’s transmission lines failed because of wind, trees and ice.

Did PSE do a good job responding to the storm and related outages? Is there a performance standard the utility is supposed to meet?

Yes and no, according to the WUTC. The state regulates the utility’s performance, and may impose requirements for better service - but there isn’t a single standard for how many days without power is too many.

“We don’t micromanage the company like that,” said Tom Schooley, assistant director for energy at the UTC. “We would look at if they did something prudently. We have service quality guarantees. We could look at it if we thought they were doing a bad job.”

Schooley and Marilyn Meehan, UTC spokeswoman, said that complaints often dictate whether service issues are a concern.

In the course of the storm and its aftermath, the commission received 29 complaints from customers who couldn’t get through to the utility on the phone to report outages – not a big number in the context of hundreds of thousands of customers.

Why did it take so long before the power restoration work reached my home?  

The utility first had to survey the damage to see what kinds of workers, equipment and materials were needed to restore the power. Some jobs required just a line crew. Others included tree crews to clear away fallen trees and limbs.

Restoration of transmission lines is the first order of business. In most winter storms, the Puget Sound may see a dozen or so of these large, high-voltage lines down. In the recent storms, 63 went down.

Restoring the transmission lines doesn’t by itself restore power to homes and businesses that have seen distribution line failures, but they’re a necessary first step to getting the power network working, said Aliabadi.

Why not bury all the power lines and eliminate the possibility of outages from wind and ice?

PSE engineers would love to see that happen, said Aliabadi. Burying lines would drastically reduce outages and improve reliability. The issue is cost. A mile of overhead transmission line may cost $500,000. A similar distance of buried line can cost $4 million.

Aliabadi also noted that repairing underground systems can increase delay, because workers can’t tell exactly where the problem is until they dig it up. Above-ground lines damaged by trees can take days to fix. Underground repairs can take weeks.

Then there’s the issue of right-of-way large enough to bury the lines along with the other utilities such as water, gas and sewers already underground.

“We once estimated, because the residents there asked, what it would cost to bury all the lines on Bainbridge Island,” said Aliabadi. “We figured it would cost at least $120 million.”  That cost would have to be recovered from ratepayers.

How much did the storm repairs cost? Who will pay the bill?

The utility is only now beginning to add up the expenses. About 90 days after the storm work is done, PSE expects to present those totals to the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission. PSE will propose a split of the cost between customers and utility investors. The WUTC will decide who pays how much and when. If the commission decides that ratepayers will share the cost of the burden of restoring the system, the cost could be incorporated into the next general rate increase granted PSE and spread over several years.

That’s what happened in the case of the Hanukkah Eve storm, PSE said.

How much does PSE budget for storm damage repairs?

The utility budgeted $8 million for storm repairs this year, the same it has allocated for several years.  While all the bills aren’t in yet, the most recent storm is likely to exceed that budget, said Thompson.  Some years, that budget isn’t fully used up.  In others, like 2012 and 2006, it isn’t sufficient to cover repair costs.

PSE is requesting a rate increase. Is that intended to offset the costs of repairs from storm damage?

No. The requested rate increase dates to last summer. PSE wants an 8.1 percent rate increase for electrical customers (roughly $8.37 per month for an average residential customer.) The WUTC, which can approve or reject rate increases, will make a final decision later this spring. Commission staffers have submitted a counterproposal that recommends a lower rate increase – approximately $2.05 per month for residential customers.

According to testimony and records filed with the UTC, the biggest reason for PSE’s request is the planned construction of a wind farm in the Lower Snake River Canyon, a project that PSE says will require $170 million in revenue, mandated by state and federal regulations requiring investment in renewable power.  

Were there any unusual circumstances that slowed work on restoring transmission lines recently?

Some of the downed transmission lines are in mountainous areas hard to survey from the ground. Those areas are usually surveyed by helicopter. The day of the ice storm, two of the three helicopters hired for surveying were grounded because of weather. Line or pole failures in wild areas take considerable effort to fix because of deep snow and difficult terrain.

Another complication was the few remaining PSE’s substations that are fed by only a single transmission line, particularly in Thurston County. When that transmission line failed, all of the circuits served by that substation went down. Other substations are fed by multiple lines creating a redundant source of power if one line is crippled.

PSE is gradually upgrading those substations with a single transmission line such as the one near the Olympia Airport, which is due to be replaced later this year with an updated substation elsewhere.

Did PSE have sufficient stock of materials to replace those damaged in the storm?  

Aliabadi said the utility was prepared with pre-stocked materials to replace those damaged. By midway through the restoration effort, the utility had already replaced 70 miles of wire, 8,000 fuses and 250 poles. Crews had made 28,000 wire splices.

Beyond the storm-caused damage, did crews encounter unexpected conditions that impeded distribution line restorations?

In at least two instances, the crews showed up at the damage sites to find that thieves had cut the downed distribution lines to salvage the copper in them, said the utility. The thieves had taken their lives in their hands not knowing whether the lines were live or not. Aliabadi said all lines should be treated as if they are live. With the proliferation of home generators, said IBEW’s Guillot, a new danger comes from improperly connected home generators feeding power back into the grid from the customer side. Crews take special precautions to guard against that possibility.

In circumstances like the Mankers’, why did the power go out repeatedly?  

High winds late in the repair process last week undid some of the work already accomplished, said the utility. In other cases, other faults revealed themselves after the repair crews left.

Power crews told Manker that once the initial repair was made, the demand on the line for power rose steeply because the neighborhood was simultaneously getting its homes up to habitable temperatures, heating water, washing and drying clothes and cooling refrigerators and freezers.

“Balancing the system is a critical element in getting the power restored,” said PSE’s Thompson.  “Too much demand or too much power can cause the system to trip off just like a breaker in your home,” he said.

Why can’t those crews immediately return to the site where their recent repairs are undone by other problems?

They’re scheduled to move on to other problem areas once their initial job is done, said Aliabadi. A new problem that again puts the area in the dark goes to the bottom of the list.

Do any governmental facilities, industries or critical buildings get priority being restored?

Transmission lines come first. Without those connections, no homes, businesses or facilities can be restored, said PSE spokesman Thompson. Once those are back in service, PSE puts critical emergency facilities such as fire and police stations and hospitals on priority for restored service.  Most of those are equipped with emergency generators that can sustain operations for a while.  Once those are up and running again, the company works on areas where their work will yield the biggest benefits.  If a downed line, for instance affects 1,000 homes, it will be repaired before a line that feeds 50 houses. Industries get no priority, he said.  “We don’t treat Boeing differently than anyone else,” he said.

As for the Mankers, they’re considering some sort of backup power or moving to an area where the power supply is more reliable.

Staff writer Sean Robinson contributed to this report.