Hurricane Restoration at Its Finest
Covering 20,000 sq miles (51,800 sq km) in central Florida, Progress Energy is no stranger to storms. However, the 2004 hurricane season delivered a surprising blow to this utility, marking the first time in recorded history that four powerful hurricanes pummeled the state in such a short period of time. First it was Charley, then came Frances, followed by Ivan and Jeanne. It's hard to forget the wrath these hurricanes brought upon Florida almost one year ago, delivering four storms in just under six weeks and wreaking havoc on Progress Energy's service territory in 35 counties.
Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., Progress Energy has more than 24,000 MW of generation capacity and $9 billion in annual revenues with holdings that include two electric utilities serving approximately 2.9 million customers in North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.
Before taking a look at best practices and lessons learned from its hurricane restoration efforts, it's important to paint a clear picture of the depth of devastation Progress Energy faced in the wake of each storm.
Charley
Making landfall in Punta Gorda, Florida, on August 13
Frances
Blowing in with slightly less force at 100 mph as a Category 2 storm, Frances struck on September 4
Ivan
Next came Ivan on September 16
Jeanne
As if the first three hurricanes hadn't brought enough punishment, Jeanne finally made her debut at 110 mph on September 25
More Startling Statistics
Looking at the unprecedented storm season collectively, more than 6.5 million ft (nearly 1235 miles [1988 km]) of primary and secondary wire were replaced as well as 6664 power poles — more than 50 miles (80 km) if laid end to end. More than 4000 overhead and underground transformers were replaced. Progress Energy also used more than 87,000 splices to reconnect severed power lines. For more startling statistics, including outage, transmission and restoration figures over the course of each hurricane, see page 22.
With damage to almost 60% of the utility's transmission and distribution systems, crews from all over the country — from California to Canada — lent Progress Energy a helping hand. To complicate matters, many of the linemen and tree trimmers from other states that normally would have been called upon to assist in the recovery were already engaged in restoration efforts elsewhere from previous hurricanes or in preparation of the next storm to make landfall.
Breaking down its hurricane restoration efforts into key categories, Progress Energy recently shared best practices and lessons learned with Transmission & Distribution World in each of its core areas, including operations, systems, staging and logistics, corporate communications, and community and customer relations.
Operations
Even though it's been a year since disaster struck Florida, Susan Mendez, regional engineering manager at Progress Energy, remembers that day like it was yesterday. It was late one Friday afternoon in August when Charley hit, Friday the 13
From an operational standpoint, Mendez says the key to successful storm responsiveness all relates back to having a comprehensive crisis-management plan and sticking to it. In Progress Energy's case, a defined structure for strategic and tactical activities ensures all employees are trained and ready to assume their storm roles on a moment's notice. What are the initial steps involved in preparing for a hurricane?
The operations staff, along with the system storm team, begins tracking what usually starts as a tropical storm at least 72 hours out and sometimes 96 hours in advance. Each of the headquarters in Progress Energy's four regional territories (north coastal, gulf coastal, north central and south central) has one main storm room and up to six additional smaller rooms for operations. According to Mendez, the first line of defense in 2004 was putting a damage- assessment team in place and coordinating the proper resources as the storm approached. At 24 hours out, operations managers review resource needs against the current forecast and adjust mobilization plans, deploy staging and logistics team personnel to appropriate locations, and plan to deploy final teams to inland sites at landfall as well as predeploy damage-assessment teams into impacted areas.
Looking back, Mendez maintains that the first hurricane was the most devastating, because it delivered a surprise by interrupting all traditional means of communications. “We had two operations centers completely without communication,” says Mendez, explaining that one of the major challenges was the fact that the T-1 computer lines were down, as well as telephones land lines and some cell towers. “In the operating centers, we had to communicate minute by minute with the folks sitting in the emergency operation centers, making sure that we were responding to the highest-priority needs. Because we couldn't communicate with a couple of our operating centers for two to three days, we actually had people going back and forth like carrier pigeons.”
In addition to communications, scheduling was another critical factor, notes Mendez, reiterating the importance of assigning adequate personnel to each shift in the operations center. “It was essential that you have a solid night shift,” she says.
Mendez says the help Progress received from its sister company, Carolina Power & Light, was a lifesaver. “They would come in and take over night shifts a lot,” she says. “They prepared packages for the crews so they would be ready the next morning. That way, when a crew came in at 6 a.m., they would eat breakfast, get their instructions and have actual packets of information, including a map and instructions, for the locations they needed to go that day.”
System Storm Center
Serving as night storm director during Hurricane Charley, lead storm director for Frances and Ivan, and then overseeing crew mobilization efforts for the entire state of Florida during Jeanne, Laura Boisvert held a critical role in Progress Energy's restoration efforts. Aside from streamlining communications, Boisvert says the key to a restoration effort of this size and scope was sticking to a detailed plan of attack. Throughout the course of the four storms, Progress Energy proved its approach worked. By maintaining flexibility to adjust to changing conditions, the utility enhanced its storm plan from storm to storm. “It all comes down to your planning and pre-planning, and then living by that plan going into storm season,” Boisvert says. “I think that is what helped us keep focused — we were committed to sticking to the plan, committed to our goals and committed to what we needed to accomplish.”
Concentrating on communicating daily goals to the organization at the system level, which then trickled down to the regional and local levels through a precise chain of command hierarchy, Boisvert facilitated a storm call twice a day with leaders from appropriate teams to set daily objectives, which were also e-mailed out following the call and posted in the control center. “Even though we had an excess of 40 people who played a part in that call, we stuck to a strict 30-minute agenda,” she says. “We would start with our most important area, safety, and then list 5 to 10 specific goals for the organization. In all cases, we would outline restoration goals as well as an estimated time of completion so that we could get the word out quickly to our communities, enabling them to make plans. We would start at the county level and then drill down to cities and areas as we migrated through the restoration to get more specific.”
Ironically, these calls encompassed discussions of more than one hurricane at a time. “You know it's an unbelievable season when you discuss cleanup efforts from a previous hurricane, current restoration efforts on the storm at hand and then finish up with planning for the next hurricane,” she says. “That all would literally happen in one phone call.”
In retrospect, one area Boisvert says Progress Energy improved upon from storm to storm was communication with communities, coupled with its presence at the county emergency operation centers (EOCs). “We wanted to make sure that we designated folks to staff the EOCs and actually dedicated restoration resources because our local governments and counties would identify urgent issues for us,” she says.
From a systems standpoint, establishing EOC and governmental support was the first step of a three-phase approach. Next, the utility tried to quickly restore its backbone system, taking inventory of sections of a feeder it couldn't restore immediately, identifying any devices that weren't working and then assessing the damage. “If you start getting backbone feeders up, that's really what is going to drive your restoration effort,” Boisvert says. “We plan for that before storm season begins by ensuring we have a prioritized list of feeders in case of a hurricane.”
Staging and Logistics
A 24-year employee of Progress Energy, Ann Newhouse's responsibility as head of the Florida staging and logistics team borders on mind-boggling. Throughout the course of five storms, four of them hurricanes, Newhouse oversaw 53 different staging sites, the serving of 370,000 meals and the fueling of as many as 8500 trucks per day — all with no accidents or injuries.
Mapping out prioritized staging sites and making agreements with owners of shopping centers, schools and airports ahead of time, Newhouse was able to come in and set up “mini cities” across the state to orchestrate staging and logistics operations. In addition, many of Progress Energy's customers, communities and governmental agencies rallied behind their efforts by offering support such as the hoteliers, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the strategically located Orange County Convention Center.
Off-system line and service crews drove in their own trucks, but Progress Energy provided all materials, including poles, wires, transformers, storm kits, fuel and maps. Comparing the task in front of her team to moving armies, Newhouse says a big portion of her group's success stemmed from advance preparation with the supply chain. “Our supply chain management works with us and our operation centers in advance of the storm to determine what kind of supplies they're going to need,” she says. “After assembling the semi tractor trailer loads of supplies together and dropping them at our staging sites, they take forklifts and set up the materials areas much like an operations center.”
In addition to serving meals, tracking supplies, renting and chartering vehicles, and fueling trucks, Newhouse had to coordinate housing efforts for the thousands of off-system crews that rushed to Progress Energy's aid. “We had to ensure they were fed and had a place to sleep,” she says. “Our advanced planning and training ensures we're processing them through our sites in the most efficient and effective manner; there's all kinds of planning and details that go along with that. If your materials are not set up and organized in a fashion that's going to allow those trucks to get what they need quickly and move on, you're going to slow down the whole restoration process. There are all kinds of potential pinch points.”
One of the things Newhouse was most impressed with was the level of dedication and teamwork exhibited by every employee. In addition to the staging and logistics teams in Florida, additional Carolina personnel left their homes and families for weeks to assist with the record number of sites opened. “The dedication of our people was incredible, the number of hours that they put in,” she says. “We had people that would not even go home because they were determined not to leave until they knew every person had a bed to sleep in.”
Newhouse recalls picking up the phone to call for anything — even in areas with limited resources where we had to look for alternative housing — and seeing employees rising to the occasion, usually within 12 hours. “It never failed. Someone would find a school or some other location where we could bring in cots, which is better than putting someone up in a tent out in the elements,” she says. “Because the crews were working 16- to 18-hour days, we wanted to get them a good night's sleep in a hotel if we could, but sometimes you had to get creative. It was absolutely amazing how people responded. Whatever we needed, they made it happen.”
Corporate Communications
Whether it was buying time on local and national media, designing advertisements and announcements for television, radio and print, writing public service announcements, updating Internet content and statistics, briefing reporters, or arranging press tours for media in the field, the corporate communications staff at Progress Energy wore many hats during the 2004 hurricane restoration efforts. Media spokesman Aaron Perlut's duty is very similar in both his storm role and day-to-day capacity, managing the utility's media relations for the state of Florida.
As part of a larger team that works to manage internal and external communications for the utility, Perlut says the most vital function his department played in the effort was making sure everyone in the company was on the same page from a communications perspective — singing from the same sheet of music, as he puts it — and then disseminating that information effectively to external stakeholders who are craving information. This includes state and local government officials, large industrial customers, media, employees and customers.
“What we tried to do was make sure that we had messaging and question and answer documents prepared that were appropriate and in sync with what was going on from the operational side,” he says. “That way, if someone called into our customer service center from St. Petersburg and was told his or her neighborhood would be back on by a specific time, that customer would be getting the same accurate story as the mayor of St. Petersburg who was getting the message from our community relations manager.”
Another effective strategy involved providing outage updates around new cycles, which Perlut explains are generally first thing in the morning, around noon, 5 p.m. in the afternoon and then 11 p.m. “We coordinated with our operations side to have updates one hour prior to each news cycle,” he says. “By the time the news cycle was running, we were providing media with the appropriate numbers in terms of how many customers remained down. We were also externally communicating to public officials and providing those same numbers to our customer service center. At a certain point, it starts functioning like a machine. As long as you keep everyone rested and informed, that machine runs very efficiently.”
In addition to providing enough timely information to the public as the hurricanes unfolded, Perlut maintains it was also very important to make sure the utility was providing new and interesting avenues for the media to help the company manage customers' expectations. “This included everything from public service announcements to feature stories to providing tips on generator safety,” he says. “We had a lot of customers using generators that may not necessarily know how to use them effectively and safely. Safety was a very important part of our outreach, making sure that our customers were safe.”
Community and Customer Relations
Working hand in hand with corporate communications, the community and customer relations team deals mostly with local and state governmental organizations and large customers, prioritizing facilities in terms of health and safety, fire and rescue, and water and sewerage. Coordinating staffing and resources to this team, Gail Simpson, manager of public policy, pulled double duty as coordinator of this storm team, working in EOCs, storm centers and the community. One of the customer and community relations' main objectives is making sure the EOCs are staffed with skilled personnel who work as liaisons to storm centers to prioritize restoration work. Responsible for several counties, each regional community relations manager has specific team members under them, including EOC representatives, operation center liaisons and backup community relations managers. Before the storm even starts, this group begins contacting elected officials, community leaders and key customers via phone or e-mail to start the flow of communication.
No one knows their communities better than the people who work in these communities everyday. “When you think about the idea of storm restoration on the level that we had to handle it last year, we and the governments were interdependent on each other,” Simpson says. “Working together closely allowed the government to communicate more information to residents, which helped them to feel more assured and to know what to expect.”
Simpson explains that the team took a system-wide restoration approach, which would then trickle down to the regional level. Receiving informational updates several times a day from corporate communications, this group would start with issues impacting the entire network working on top priorities down to the individual customer level.
“We would start with road clearing, because nobody can do anything if you can't get around — not us, the police or the fire department,” she says. “We would coordinate identifying if lines were hot and needed to be cleared, which was the first step. Also on top of the list are life safety issues, such as hospitals and health care shelters. Critical intersections and movement was also unbelievably important as well as telecommunications.”
To execute an initiative of this magnitude, prior training was a must. Simpson says from storm to storm the team placed increasing emphasis on EOC training the employees in the EOCs as well as other representatives who would be working out in the communities. “This included everything from where they are going to get information to how they are going to keep the center informed to how they interact with other operations centers,” she says. “We have also done an increasingly better job on our priority list, working with the counties to update it since last year. Our customer service systems are set up for billing, so we have improved how we put information into these accounts to make them more useful for storm-restoration purposes.”
In addition to pre-storm drills, the group also has conducted regional community workshops to promote education and awareness of disaster responsiveness. “We bring in the local officials and EOC directors/representatives to hear from them what they would like us to be doing,” she says. “By hearing their feedback, we can work on making improvements.”
Looking Back and Looking Forward
In retrospect, Progress Energy employees can look back on the unforgettable 2004 hurricane season with pride, knowing that such trying times strengthened not only their organization but themselves. From accountants to engineers to clerical workers to energy auditors, all employees fulfilled their individual storm roles with dedication.
By adopting best practices from the monumental hurricane restoration effort, the utility will continue to work internally to refine restoration priorities and improve storm plans based on lessons learned during 2004 and apply them to the 2005 hurricane season as well as future disaster situations. Externally, the company also will collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders to develop additional improvements.
A five-time award winner of the Edison Electric Institute's (EEI's) “Emergency Response Award,” Progress Energy was honored last December by EEI for its outstanding efforts to restore electric power in the wake of an unprecedented storm season.
Recognizing the company for “outstanding work under extreme conditions,” EEI President Thomas R. Kuhn commended Progress Energy's extensive storm-recovery plans. “Progress Energy was faced with the Herculean task of not only cleaning up after two or even three successive storms, but also battening down in preparation for a fourth at the same time,” Kuhn said. “Using lessons learned from past events, the company quickly and efficiently implemented best practices to maximize manpower and reduce damage to equipment. It is during times like these that our industry shows its merit, and for that, it is truly a privilege to present the men and women of Progress Energy with this award.”
Ellen Parson is a freelance writer and editor based in Lee's Summit, Missouri, U.S. becaparson@comcast.net
| Staging Sites | Meals Served | Chartered Buses | Vehicles Fueled Per Day | Rented Vehicles | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charley | 14 | 129,500 | 85 | 3000 | 361 |
| Frances | 25 | 111,000 | 88 | 3000 | 730 |
| Ivan | 3 | 55,500 | 67 | 500 | 150 |
| Jeanne | 11 | 74,000 | 78 | 2000 | 517 |
| Total | 53 | 370,000 | 318 | 8500 | 1758 |
Systems at a Glance
Call center management, outage management, mobile dispatch — these are just a few of the systems that must work in concert to maximize communications and coordinate project management at any utility. Here is a snapshot of some of the different systems Progress Energy had in place at the time of last year's hurricane restoration efforts.
VRU — The “voice response unit” accepts outage calls from customers and communicates estimated restoration times without involving a “live” call rep.
Vendor: IntervoiceCall Routing — Helps to route the incoming calls to “live” representatives who can take outage information and communicate estimated restoration times.
Vendor: ConcertoCSS — The customer information system allows customer phone calls to be matched with account information and sent to outage systems for diagnosis and outage-device predictions.
Vendor: AndersonOMS — The outage management system takes customer outage information and “predicts” where the trouble may be on the utility's system.
Vendor: IntergraphMOMS — The mobile outage management system is essentially a computer application in the trucks of the utility's first outage responders, allowing them to retrieve outage tickets wirelessly in their vehicle so as to respond appropriately.
Vendor: IntergraphSCADA — Allows remote control of substation equipment and remote gathering of substation device operational data, which facilitates quicker outage restoration.
Vendor: ABB
Hurricane Dennis
Making its debut almost a year after the incredible 2004 hurricane season, Hurricane Dennis made landfall on July 10, 2005, with 120 mph winds. First impacting Florida's Pinellas County in the southern coastal portion of Progress Energy's service territory, the storm then moved northward to batter customers in the utility's north coastal region.
It took Progress Energy personnel only four days to restore service to 113,481 customers who lost power due to heavy winds, rain and flooding. At peak, there were 16,288 customers without power. A total of 43 miles (69 km) of transmission lines were out of service, and two substations sustained damage. In some of the more heavily flooded areas, such as Alligator Point in Franklin County and St. Marks in Wakulla County, access to power equipment was severely limited, challenging restoration efforts due to road closures.
“Because of the severe flooding, restoring power along the west coast and in North Florida was extremely challenging,” said Martha Barnwell, vice president of Progress Energy Florida's North Coastal Region. “We've worked around the clock and greatly appreciate the patience of our customers in the Panhandle.”
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