Hello Everyone,

As some of you may know, I live in Nassau County, on Long Island, which was the hardest hit area during the monster of a storm that was Hurricane Sandy, which struck on October 29th, 2012.  I'm sure many of you have heard on the news about the storm's severity.  In coastal areas, entire neighborhoods were decimated by flooding, and many people lost their homes and belongings.

Adding to the travesty of the storm was the fact that over 900,000 homes and businesses on Long Island lost power among the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA)'s 1.1 million customers.  Almost 90 percent of Long Island residents lost power.  The restoration of power here in the wake of the storm was agonizingly slow, due to the lack of preparedness on LIPA's part to ready itself for a storm of this magnitude.

As of this writing, MOST Long Islanders have had their power restored, the only exception is those who live in areas that were badly flooded where damage to electrical panels and wiring may have occurred (in which case a safety inspection is required prior to power restoration).

Just to cite a few examples of the slow progress made, my own house (in North Wantagh, NY) was without power for seven days, and I do not live in a coastal area.  My mother and sister, who live in Suffolk County, miraculously had power restored within three days.  My boss, who lives in a coastal area but did not experience flooding, was without power for nine days.  Residents of Hicksville, NY (which is in central Nassau County) were without power for 14 days. 

In my local area, during the past two weeks, I have seen crews of linemen from the province of New Brunswick in Canada; Joplin, Missouri; and Bagley, Minnesota.  I spoke with one crew of linemen who told me that they had been driving around the area, looking for problems with the transmission lines without any direction from LIPA at all.

Yesterday, the COO and CEO of LIPA offered his resignation, effective at the end of the year. 

So, it goes without saying, it has been quite an interesting few weeks here on Long Island, mainly due to our power authority. 

So my question is, fellow L-G members, how reliable is YOUR utility?  What have you experienced as a result of storms or outages?  Also, what did you hear on the news about what was happening here on Long Island?  I'm curious to know.

I hope everyone is well and I look forward to your responses.

-Brian         

I live in Randolph, NJ and JCP&L is our electricity provider. We lost power for three days, while some friends two blocks away had no power for 13 days! Luckily, we have a small gasoline generator (that we are currently working on - leaking head gasket, valves needed to be re-seated) that can run our water pump and refrigerator. There was not much rain, so flooding wasn't an issue. The winds, however, were unlike anything I've experienced before. Many tree branches came down, and many trees uprooted. The night of the storm I was watching the blue flashes in the sky that looked like lightning, but were power lines being shorted by branches and trees! The whole thing was quite an experience - seeing no lights around makes you realize how much our society depends on electricity.

-Luke

Union workers made the workers sent from southern states go back as they weren't Union workers.   

Powell

Wow Brian, thanks for sharing your experience.

In Northern Michigan, our two local utilities are OK for reliability, but could be better. The REA is actually quite good considering the large, somewhat remote area they cover. They have problems due to the usual factors, especially trees. However, they are pretty good about right-of-way clearing, so they have been quite reliable lately. However, I'm on the commercial electric utility and their reliability is surprisingly poor considering they have few real obstacles (like hurricanes) to deal with. Their system seems to be poorly sectionalized and over capacity. A fault far down the line can take out power to three towns with no problem and does so rather often! Repair times are always hours to a day at the most. Bad winter storms might take power out for two days or so. Also, they seem to have frequent substation problems, presumably due to old equipment and overloading. Recently a substation failure that was near the end of their territory caused an outage that spanned several cities including us. The substation fault caused additional problems in their transmission system, even though the substation was basically at the "end of the line". Our home generator gets a good workout!

Additionally, power quality is not the best. We have brownouts sometimes and often have small blinks. Voltage varies quite a bit as well.

-Nelson

When I lived in California on PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) they were pretty reliable but then again we had no major storms or anything that often...but if a tree fell down on a powerline or something it was usually fixed within a few hours...longest we were ever without power was 26 hours after a major earthquake...Additionally they let you call them and they'll give you an estimate of when power will be restored...they were/still are very reliable!
Now I live off the grid, but Juneau, Alaska (about 200 miles north of me) has (or had last I was there which was like 18 months ago) power issues. Apparently all the time eagles, seagulls, tree branches, etc. were shorting out lines.  From what I was told the power company didn't want you to call them until the power had been put for AT LEAST 45 minutes as it was a small issue that wouldn't take long to fix.

Wow guys, I live in Pennsylvania and did lose power for about 36 hrs....and it started while I was mandated for aditional shift at work.  I used a 3 massive johnson controls group 29 deep cycle battery bank that I designed on a relay circuit to automatically power up an inverter to run my main sump pump as the water was coming in and a lot of my electronic and lighting collections as downstairs. Those batteries saved a lot of my possessions and after running every 3 minutes were still at 12.6 volts the next day.  I hadn't tested the rig for about a year and was not allowed to leave for threat of firing so i only hoped my job functioned as should. I came home to them chugging away. I don't own and generator yet, but once I do the batteries will stay to cover the time I am gone till I get home from work to start it.  I was born in Medford New York and all my relatives out there suffered loss of power for many days! My uncle ran his little generator for days upon days.  I feel very badly for all that happened :-/

Wow, neat idea about a battery-inverter system for your sump pump. Glad it worked!

I live in Wallingford, CT just above New Haven and we are fortunate to have our utility run by the Town. There are two other communities in CT that have this type of ownership. Our town does a wonderful job with outages, the only time we had loss of service was in 2011 with that hurricane in August. We lost power for four days but as luck would have it, my wife and I were on a cruise to Nova Scotia the whole time.

The situation you have on LI is quite similar to what happened here in CT last year with the hurricane and the October snowstorm. CT is served by two utilities; UI (United Illuminating) and Cl&P (Connecticut Light and Power). During these storms and especially the snowstorm, both utilities were hard hit as they were unprepared for these events. Like LIPA, the CEO of CL&P was forced to resign after the snowstorm. After a lengthy investigation, it was determined that poor maintenance and tree trimming issues were to blame.

BTW- I thought LI was served by LILCO Long Island Lighting Co? I grew up in Darien, CT literally on the Sound and could see the Lilco Northport plant across the Sound from my old bedroom window.

MikeT1982, I like your idea! You just met a total off-gridder (me) and I'm pretty good with systems like that also.
How big (in watts) was your inverter? Pure or modified sine wave?

@ jercar954, Long Island was served by LILCO until 1996.  The plant you speak of may have been the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, which cost $2B to build between 1973 and 1984, but which never delivered one single kilowatt of power to any home or business on Long Island. The plant was met with extremely heavy opposition by Long Islanders for fear of a nuclear meltdown akin to the "Three Mile Island" incident of 1979. 

LILCO was a privately owned utility until New York State formed LIPA (Long Island Power Authority) which bought LILCO out, initially on the mission of A) preventing the nuclear power plant from ever operating, and B) providing better service to ratepayers.  Sadly, LIPA inherited LILCO's debts from the construction of the Shoreham nuclear plant and never caught up.  LIPA's outage-detection computer is a 27-year-old mainframe that runs on COBOL...they claim they can't afford to upgrade... 

Hey Bryan!  Glad to hear from you!  I'm actually in NY right now, working emergency response, and had been passing thru Nassau County regularly for the past week.  Was wondering how you fared the storm.

The utility serving my home area is facing a bit of a crisis.  Due to some poor planning, they have run out of capacity from cheap fuel sources like coal and gas, and are having to use expensive diesel generators meant for backup/peak as mainline generators, driving electric rates way up.  They are currently working on permitting to get an experimental clean coal plant, built in the 90s and mothballed after a test run back online, as well as building a wind farm and early permitting for a hydro dam.

Back in 2008, a series of large avalanches knocked out the lines connecting Juneau, AK with the hydro dam supplying it's power.  They did have backup generation to keep the power on, though it was diesel powered, so their rates skyrocketed for a couple months.

In Northern Kentucky there has been freezing rain and tornado weather where the power has been out for 2-3 days at the most, they seem to be pretty good at getting back on to our area.  Every now and again there are some blackouts, but those are rare.  The most it has been out was maybe a week, gas stations closed because they ran out gas when they were the only close ones with power.  The power mostly goes out when there is freezing rain where ice has covered everything and tornado winds (never have seen really big ones) that take out the power lines.

I am also glad to hear that your power has been restored Mercury Man.

I also remember years ago there was 1 brown out, I don't know if there has been any more since then.

@icefoglights, are you working emergency response for Sandy?
In Sitka, AK (about 70 miles north of me) it is a similar situation...they don't have enough hydro capacity so in the winter when everyone has all their lights on, is using electric heat, etc. the system gets overloaded and they have to supplement it with diesel generators...then an avalanche knocked out three poles carrying transmission lines from the hydro plants, and the whole town had to run on diesel generators...and they had do do rolling blackouts (one hour on, one hour off) for each half of the town because the diesel generators alone couldn't power the whole town. 
During the winter, electric rates sykrocket due to diesel surcharges...although raising the hydro dams is in the works...
But, I live off the grid and the only time MY power goes out is if my batteries get down too low and my inverter shuts off (which is rare)...then I just go start my generator!
But there is a creek near my house and we want to do hydro power off of that...

That's correct Ace.

I remember the fall of 1992 when we had a really early snow storm.  The snow was unusually wet for the area and season, and it was before the trees had dropped their leaves, so they collected lots of snow, causing many trees to bow and break, falling onto power lines.  I think it took up to a week for some areas out of town to get their power back.  I lived close to the city, in an area with underground power and a stark lack of trees, and was unaffected.  Going into the woods, I still occasionally find bowed over birch trees from that storm.

More recently, we get wind events during the summer that blow trees onto power lines.  Occasionally they happen during hot dry weather and cause problems with wildfires, but most of the time, these wind events come with cool rainy weather.  When running with the VFD, I've spent many hours pole-sitting a tree arcing on a power line waiting for the linemen to get there.  While doing mop-up where a line had been knocked down and left arcing for hours waiting for linemen, I found many pieces of lechatelierite formed in the dirt by the current.

We were out for three days.  Most of the time, we were running off my off grid solar farm battery bank (6x 115AHr 12V deep cycle RV batteries) running lights and other small stuff.  We used a generator to charge the battery bank and run stuff that couldn't run on inverter electricity.  Some neighbors said that the wind at their place peaked at 80mi/hr.
On the freaky side, the electricity went out and was restored exactly one year to the day as it did during the snowtober thing that happened last year.  It went out at exactly the same time too.  (insert X Files theme or similar music here if you wish)