Ralph LaRossa NJ Senate Budget Committee Hearing on Super Storm Sandy December 3 rd, 2012

Transcription

1 Ralph LaRossa NJ Senate Budget Committee Hearing on Super Storm Sandy December 3 rd, 2012 Good morning. My name is Ralph LaRossa and I m the President and Chief Operating Officer of Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSE&G). Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss PSE&G s preparedness, challenges and response to Super Storm Sandy. Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSE&G), is one of the largest combined electric and gas companies in the United States and is also New Jersey's oldest and largest publicly owned utility. The Public Service Corporation was formed in 1903 by amalgamating more than 400 gas, electric and transportation companies in New Jersey. It was renamed Public Service Electric and Gas Company in PSE&G currently serves nearly three quarters of New Jersey's population in a service area consisting of a 2,600-square-mile diagonal corridor across the state from Bergen to Gloucester Counties. PSE&G is the largest provider of gas and electric services, servicing 1.8 million gas customers and 2.2 million electric customers in more than 300 urban, suburban and rural communities, including New Jersey's six largest cities. Super Storm Sandy affected more than 1.7 million PSE&G customers. It was the largest and worst storm in our 109 year-history. The storm caused major flooding of substations, damaged power lines and other equipment; and caused widespread destruction in communities across our most densely populated State. The super storm surge flooded a large number of substations along the Passaic, Hackensack and Hudson rivers, and the Arthur Kill, disrupting service to customers in Hudson, Essex and Middlesex counties. The magnitude of the flooding in contiguous areas was unprecedented. PSE&G had to take these stations out of service and had to wait for the flood waters to recede before we could assess the damage, dry out the equipment, replace equipment when necessary and re-energize the system to restore service.

2 Our restoration practices followed three basic principles: I. The safety of our workforce and the public is our first priority. Not a single service will be restored until we are certain the working men and women, who themselves may be out of power at home, have a safe work environment. This sometimes means that the storm must pass before crews are able to begin to assess the damage. Then and only then does the restoration process begin. II. Secondly, the power grid, from its origin at the generating station to your home or business, is a complex network that transports large volumes of electricity through a series of step-down transformers and finally to the end user. During storms, fallen trees limbs, high winds and heavy rains or snow wreak havoc on the electric distribution grid. Super Storm Sandy compounded the effects with a surge that brought a wall of water ranging from four to eight feet devastating many of our switching and substations. III. Lastly, restoration plans following storms such as this are designed to get power back on to the most people in the shortest time. Crews rely on a process recognized as an industry standard best to get power back on as quickly as possible. Hospitals, police departments, fire stations and other public health and safety facilities are priority number one. After the critical facilities are restored, restoration crews begin with primary lines that can restore power to perhaps thousands of people. Then they move to lateral lines that can affect hundreds; secondary lines that affect dozens; and finally to service drops at individual homes. My remarks today will focus on three aspects of the storm: First, our preparations for Super Storm Sandy; Second, the actions we took in the storm s aftermath; and, Finally, based on what we have learned from this storm, I ll provide some recommendations from my vantage point on how we should move forward to better protect our electric and gas infrastructure and respond to future events such as Super Storm Sandy.

3 Anticipating Super Storm Sandy PSE&G began preparations for Super Storm Sandy on October 24 th or five days before the storm hit. Our normal prep activities included items such as: Safety preparations; Securing Mutual Assistance from neighboring utilities, which resulted in securing 1,000 additional FTEs before the storm hit to supplement PSE&G s own field crew of 600 linemen. PSE&G also secured 1,270 tree trimmers to clear damaged trees and limbs from power lines. Crews from Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia and New Jersey, as well as from Canada began to arrive by Sunday, October 28 th. Supplemental protective measures were implemented at substations to prevent/address substation flooding. We began with those that had flooded during Hurricane Irene. Despite these measures, the storm surge flooded a large number of substations along the Passaic, Hackensack and Hudson rivers, and the Arthur Kill. We performed tree trimming on critical circuits prior to the storm, and we worked with our key vendors to ensure we had adequate inventories of critical items such as poles, wire and transformers on hand. This preparation was pro-active and across the board. From a communications standpoint, we contacted officials at all levels of government, with 700 contacts at the municipal level alone. On Friday October 26 th, we personally contacted all of the local elected officials in our service territory, along with state elected officials and relevant government offices providing needed contact information in anticipation of the storm. These preemptive communications also included pre-storm calls to all Boards of Education for relevant school restoration updates to confirm their contact information; as well as statewide calls and updates for mayors, legislators, and our congressional delegation.

4 Super Storm Sandy severely impacted PSE&G Service Territory Challenges The Size and the Power of Storm Twice the size of Irene Widespread impact 900 square miles Incredibly strong winds up to 90 MPH When the Super Storm Hit 29% of our switching stations & 39% of our substations were affected by the storm. PSE&G has a total of 294 switching stations and substations on its system. Of those, 96 electric substations and 12 switching stations were affected as a result of the storm surge. The storm surge brought a wall of water ranging from four to eight feet into the locations damaging the equipment. Some of these stations had never been impacted by water damage in the 60 to 85 years that they existed. The work to restore those stations required painstaking, labor intensive drying and cleaning of equipment to get them back in service. 33% of our transmission and sub transmission lines were impacted by the storm - 51 transmission lines and 355 sub transmission lines were interrupted as a result of the storm. More than 3/4 of our distribution circuits were interrupted approximately 1,000 transformers Over 2,500 poles were damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced -- Almost three times the number we replaced in last year s two storms. (Thanks to pre-storm preparation, we never ran out of equipment to restore service.) Record Number of Trees Impacted - Over 48,000 locations where we removed or trimmed trees in our service territory (compared to 22,500 after Irene). The record tree and pole damage slowed our ability to restore power in Union, Middlesex, Bergen and western Essex counties as we struggled to gain access to streets, and in some cases backyards, to repair overhead lines.

5 Mutual Aid Assistance totaled more than 4,500 workers from across the country and Canada over 3,200 linemen, over 1,200 tree personnel and over 100 substation personnel. The Nor easter, following the week of Super Storm Sandy, created even more damage and put temporary repairs at risk. Customers Impacted Twice the number of customers who were impacted by Hurricane Irene million PSE&G customers losing power over three quarters of our customer base. Almost three times the number of customers in the October 2011 snow storm. We serve over 200 communities; every single one of them had significant outages due to this unprecedented super storm. Our gas customers were impacted as well. Flooding occurred in 25 towns in our service territory. Over 41,000 premises had inspections performed by our gas technicians, with about 6,700 violations issued, and over 9,500 gas meters replaced. We also had to clear water out of about 80,000 feet of gas main to get gas service back in those towns. Public Outreach Although Super Storm Sandy was an unprecedented storm, we made 2.1 million electric service restorations in a two-week period, including the Nor easter a record for any American utility. All the while, we maintained, and in some instances increased, contact with the communities we serve. Daily communications with the Governor and we thank him for his leadership and the Garden State s public officials for their support. Regional daily calls with Mayors and other local and statewide elected officials with PSE&G division managers with direct knowledge of the restoration efforts and progress. The calls enabled elected officials to express their concerns directly, followed with personalized calls in those cases where data was not readily available.

6 I personally conducted daily media calls to provide up to date information on our restoration efforts and challenges affecting our ongoing efforts Daily communications updates to local, state elected officials, key state agency representatives and key constituencies. More than 800,000 customers received frequent updates to reflect developments with the restoration efforts, impact on system, or other relevant information. Restoration progress also provided on company website which was updated frequently to reflect the status of the restoration efforts. I can speak personally to a dozen or so meetings I had with over 100 key state, local and federal elected officials. Additional outreach efforts included mobile command centers for ice, water, meals, and in some instances, generators. We worked with the county OEMs to prioritize power restoration requests. Finally, we utilized social media, like Twitter, to not only increase customer contact, but provide it in more of a two-way fashion. I can assure you that we did everything possible to prepare for and respond to this historic super storm. But I realize that the question this committee is concerned with is what we need to do so the next time a storm of this magnitude hits New Jersey again. Like every other utility in New Jersey, we were hampered by the lack of information at the customer level. Our systems only have information at the transmission, switching, substation and circuit level. When the circuit is restored, we have no way of knowing that a particular customer does not have service unless they report it individually. We know that led to some frustration. We can respond faster and smarter to get all of our critical infrastructure back; not just electric, but gas, water, transportation, and everything else we depend on as a modern society. We have begun to take a hard look at the lessons learned from Sandy and how we can do better. After Irene and the October snowstorm of last year, we learned many lessons that we built into our disaster response.

7 Sandy and the increased frequency of extreme weather events may now define a new normal, as even Governor Christie has recently noted. All the conclusions won t emerge in one day. But it s clear that we will need to continue strengthening our infrastructure to assure safe, reliable energy for our customers long into the future. Many options need to be examined from ways to build more redundancy and resiliency into our system, to the use of other two-way communication tools, to revisiting our tree trimming practices. And this hardly exhausts the list of possible improvements worth exploring. But we need to engage in a larger dialogue as well. If what we have seen over the past few years is indeed part of the new normal, we need to thoroughly evaluate what we want from our electric system for the future. Many of the options to be considered will require significant investments. This will require an honest dialogue with all stakeholders, homeowners, businesses from the local mom-andpop to the Fortune 500, and officials from Trenton on down, to come to a consensus on what we are willing to invest and how quickly we can rebound when storms like this hit our state. I think we all agree that just repairing the system to what we had before is no longer adequate. Therefore, we need to work together to be sure we understand the benefits, and costs, of an electric system for the future. PSE&G looks forward to working with you to solve that issue. We welcome an ongoing dialogue and thank you again for the opportunity to serve the State of New Jersey. Thank you for your time.