Restoring your electricity safely following a major storm: UK Power Networks response to the storms of 23 & 24 December 2013

Transcription

1 Restoring your electricity safely following a major storm: UK Power Networks response to the storms of 23 & 24 December 2013

2 Introduction UK Power Networks is firmly committed to operating a safe and resilient network and continuously improving response to extreme weather events. This document aims to provide our customers and wider stakeholders with an overview of the measures and initiatives we undertook when preparing and responding to devastating winds and flooding that affected our network on 23 and 24 December, and to invite feedback on various elements of our response to this system emergency. Director of Customer Services, Matt Rudling said: After the worst Christmas weather in years caused widespread damage to power lines in the South East and East of England, it took us longer than we wanted to reconnect supplies. Your welfare remained our paramount priority throughout, and we tried to keep you informed and supported wherever possible, in every way we could. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, many of you spent this Christmas period without electricity and, while we restored supplies as quickly as circumstances allowed, we understand the impact this has had on you and your families, especially at such an important time of the year. We apologise to everyone who was affected by the power cuts over the festive period and would like to assure you that we take power cuts very seriously. To deal with the emergency caused by the December storms, many staff gave up their holidays to repair extensive damage, volunteer in the call centre on Christmas and Boxing Day or go out into the communities affected by power cuts as customer champions. Once all supplies in the East of England were reconnected, we moved engineers south to help local repair crews, arranged hundreds of Christmas dinners and provided hotel accommodation and takeaways for the most vulnerable customers. We have embarked on a review process to determine and implement measures that would help us improve the level of services we provide. Please give us your feedback by completing an online survey or attending one of our stakeholder engagement sessions planned in February. The details can be found in this document. We want your feedback We welcome views and suggestions on what we can do better to improve customer experience and make the electricity network more resilient. To help us collect feedback, we have launched an online survey which we encourage you to complete. To access the survey, please go to ukpowernetworks.co.uk/internet/en/ have-your-say/ and then scroll down the page and click on Complete a Survey. Please feel free to forward the link to anyone who has been affected by power storms. With additional written feedback, please contact us on stakeholder.engagement@ ukpowernetworks.co.uk Information in this document: Preparing for the storms Additional services provided The storm hits Our response to getting the lights back on Priority Service Register and assistance available to vulnerable customers Levels of compensation and how to claim Communicating with our customers Next steps

3 Preparing for the storms Weather events can be severe and there are occasions when our network is unavoidably damaged. As a matter of course, we constantly monitor weather patterns. Prior and during the December storms too, we worked closely with the Met Office to receive the most timely information. This enabled us to plan ahead and ensure we had adequate staff out in the field and manning our call centres. The Senior Management team held a series of storm planning meetings to assess the risk of the storm and forecast the impact on the networks. Employees were informed and emergency plans were put in place. Additional resources were secured for key business areas and deployed in readiness for the storm. The resilience of our network is vitally important to us. As a company, by the end of financial year 2013/14 we will have spent almost 510 million on the network ensuring that it remains safe and reliable. This is part of a projected annual investment of 1.8 billion over the five years to 2015, with 651 million going to both our Eastern and our South Eastern Networks. This money is spent on a wide array of initiatives including: Replacing power lines with covered electricity conductors to increase resilience against windborne debris Trimming Protecting and felling of trees close to our assets to prevent them damaging our network in the future our substations against flooding through flood defences such as bunding and elevating them off the ground and out of danger The St Jude storm that hit both our Eastern and South Eastern Networks in October 2013 was followed by a series of consultations with our stakeholders. As a result of the feedback received, we activated additional services to help improve our response: A live power cut map was launched on our website to allow our customers to view network faults in their area. The map is updated regularly and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. As Regular an alternative to phoning our call centre to report a fault, an online self-service fault reporting application was made available. s were sent to our stakeholders, including parish councils, local authorities and MPs, updating them on the progress of our response.

4 The storm hits As you will have seen from overhead power lines at the side of the road and substations at the end of residential roads, much of our network is in the community and can be susceptible to the elements. The high winds had caused damaged trees and other debris to down power cables across our network. Within a few hours we had seen the equivalent of several weeks worth of faults on our network. Water can damage substations and underground cables. On the evening of 23 December 2013, a storm struck the south of England. It then tracked east through our South Eastern and Eastern Networks through the night and into the early hours of Christmas Eve. It was not just the winds that caused our network problems though. Heavy rains fell on already saturated ground causing localised flooding across the region. With winds of up to 72mph and over 30mm of rain falling in our region in as little as twelve hours, the storm had a devastating effect on our assets. Where there is a possibility that flood water will affect our equipment, either in your home or outside, our first priority is always safety and we sometimes find ourselves in a position where we have to turn power off for customers to ensure their safety. Our response to getting the lights back on The storm damage resulted in over 2,400 faults. These were primarily in the South East but also the East of England. More than 460,000 properties experienced power cuts overnight into Christmas Eve with the counties of Kent, Surrey and Sussex being hardest hit. The vast majority of our customers were restored within the first 24 hours. Helicopter pilots and observers completed 24 patrols of our network to pinpoint damage, but, with 16,500 kilometres of overhead power lines in the South East alone, repairing the damaged parts of the network was a considerable task. East of England Network 132kV 1 4 EHV 9 23 HV South East Network LV & Service Faults Total Table 1: No of faults in EPN & SPN Over 850 staff gave up their Christmas holidays to help restore supplies. This included engineers, customer service call advisors and back office staff. In addition, a number of our customer champions were deployed on sites. Customer champions are UK Power Networks specially trained volunteers that go out in to the field and assist our field teams by providing practical support to customers off supply. We would like to thank our colleagues at Northern Powergrid, as well as our partners, staff, contractors and everyone else who has taken part in the large-scale effort to get customers back on supply as quickly and safely as possible during the festive season.

5 Communicating with our customers Good communication is vital during a power cut and we strive to keep our customers updated about the cause of interruption and the progress of repairs. An explanation as to what is happening, reassurance that work is being done to restore supplies and time estimate as to when repairs are due to be completed as well as information related to additional services available when required (such as hot food and beverages and hotel accommodation) are important messages that customers have the right to expect of us. Accurate and timely information allows them the opportunity to make informed choices and plan accordingly. It also allows our emergency responder partners to coordinate their support efforts more effectively and provide the right level of assistance for vulnerable customers. The scale and severity of the December storms meant that we received very high levels of contact from our customers. Further to this direct contact with individual customers, we made attempts to keep them up to date through other channels. Between 22 and 28 December the team responded 24/7 to about 400 media enquiries, 49 of which resulted in TV and radio interviews. Thirteen press releases were also pro-actively issued to the journalists on our contact lists and those who had called in. In addition, thirteen updates were sent to parish councils throughout Kent, Surrey and Sussex during the recovery period from the storm and regular updates were also sent to local authorities, MPs and other stakeholders. We deeply regret that due to the scale, severity and timing of the December storms, we were sometimes unable to provide customers off supply with information of the quality and accuracy that we would have liked, such as accurate times when their power would be back on. We are currently holding a series of consultations to solicit feedback and put in place measures that would improve communication with our customers in emergencies. We will be updating stakeholders on the proposed initiatives and seeking further feedback in the stakeholder sessions that we are organising for February. Between 23 and 30 December, our call centre received over 175,000 calls. This is equivalent to three months worth of calls in just one week. We also made over 20,000 outbound calls to customers between Christmas Eve and Saturday 28 December to update them on the progress of their fault. Our website was regularly refreshed with important information on the progress we were making. Our site received over 165,000 visits during the Christmas week compared to a little over 19,000 the week before. I would like to say thank you from Tenterden for changing your circulation list and informing people on the ground (i.e. adding me to your direct circulation list) as to what was going on so I could push information out via our Twitter, Facebook accounts and on our Tenterden forum. We were very lucky in Tenterden, Kent, as most of our local people were back on full power within a few days, others of course were not so lucky. Sue Ferguson Tenterden Town Councillor Social media was an important avenue of communication before, during and after the storm hit. We increased the numbers to our social media teams by 300%. These staff responded to queries through Twitter and Facebook: during the storm period they received 7,091 tweets and 920 Facebook messages. In the Christmas week, our online fault map received nearly 63,000 visits, whilst the self-service fault reporting was used by nearly 1,000 customers.

6 Additional services provided UK Power Networks is acutely aware that we cannot always get our customers back on power as quickly as we would like. We regret that during the December storms, due to the severity of the weather, many customers were without power for a considerable length of time. In that period, we offered a number of services to try and look after our customers off supply in a variety of ways. We provided customers with hot meals and drinks in severely affected areas. On Christmas day, a catering van was deployed in Canterbury and served 600 full Christmas dinners with turkey and all the trimmings. Overall, 2,393 meals were served across 50 locations. In addition to the use of catering vans, we paid for 205 customers to dine out on Christmas Day. On 27 December, we provided hot food and drinks to over 500 customers in the village of Yalding and delivered pizzas to over 60 customers in Staplehurst. Christmas Day. Many people in the village of Eastry Kent were extremely pleased to see us and send their thanks to you for our attendance. We agreed the festive menu with you however to try and make Christmas dinner as normal as we could we got a lot of customers to bring their dinner plates to us and plated up Turkey sausage meat stuffing and cranberry sauce to take indoors. One particular old lady came to see us three times. I think the light from the catering unit was welcome as well as the goodies on offer. Her last visit just before we left we filled up her flasks as well with hot tea and we took round to her house two or three boxes of mince pies to see her through and share with friends. Bobby s Burgers on their involvement in the December 2013 storms Vulnerable customers We maintain and manage a Priority Service Register and we encourage vulnerable customers to register with us so we can extend them the right level of support in emergencies. Once registered, customers receive a contact number which ensures that, when they try to contact us, their call is treated as a priority. We continuously seek to identify vulnerable customers and place them on our PSR so that in electrical emergency situations, we are able to check on their welfare needs pro-actively and contact them with relevant updates. In line with our current process, in the December storms, we undertook the following initiatives: We liaised with our British Red Cross partners to ensure they were activated where needed to offer welfare support to the vulnerable customers affected by power cuts. We Our provided 700 hotel rooms for identified vulnerable customers, including families with young children. Customer Champions were also out in the field over the Christmas holiday to support customers at various incidents across the South East. The Priority Service Register is only as good as the information it contains. We therefore encourage anyone who believes they are eligible to sign up. This will allow us to extend the right level of support to those customers who need it most. If you or someone you know, meets our criteria above and lives in London, the South East of England or the East of England then please apply by either: ing psr@ukpowernetworks.co.uk Writing to Customer Relations team, UK Power Networks, Fore Hamlet, Ipswich, IP3 8AA Applying online here:

7 Compensation UK Power Networks understands that there is no good time for a power cut, but the Christmas period is certainly a very difficult time to experience a supply interruption. As a gesture of goodwill we have decided to boost the industry standard payment from 27 to 54 for customers who were without power for hours. Customers that were without power for longer will also be entitled to an additional 54 for each 12 hour period thereafter, up to a maximum payment of 432 (double the statutory limit). For power cuts that lasted between hours and included any part of Christmas Day, the goodwill payment will rise to 75. We have been proactive in notifying customers eligible for payments. A total of 23,490 customers have been contacted and are due to receive a cheque payment within 7 to 10 days of the receipt of the completed claim form. If you have experienced power cuts in the December storms and believe that you are eligible for compensation, please visit our website for more information Next steps We firmly believe that our stakeholders have a say in what we do and we take all feedback collected very seriously. Complete the online survey To access the survey, please go to and then scroll down the page and click on Complete a Survey. Sign up for stakeholder session In February. We will be holding a number of stakeholder events to look specifically at storm related issues and our response to this severe weather event. 7 February 09:30-13:00 - Novotel Ipswich Centre,Grey Friars Road, Ipswich, IP1 1UP 25 February 09:30-13:00 -Arora Hotel, Southgate Avenue, Crawley, West Sussex, RH10 6LW. If you are interested in attending, please contact us on stakeholder. engagement@ukpowernetworks.co.uk We will be collating responses and a full report on our findings will be published later this year.