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Governor Dannel Malloy says the state's largest utility wasn't prepared to handle the freak October snowstorm that cut power to much of the state. As WNPR's Jeff Cohen reports, Malloy says Connecticut Light and Power had poor storm planning, response, and communication.
CL&P faced heavy criticism as it missed self-imposed deadlines and took 11 days to fully restore power to its customers. The company's president eventually resigned.
But there are now new details of how off-the-mark the company actually was. A report prepared by outside consultant Witt Associates says that CL&P's emergency response plan only considered outages of over 100,000 customers. At the peak of the October outages, more than 800,000 customers were without power. Here's Governor Malloy.
"CL&P was completely unprepared for a storm of this magnitude. But the extent to which they were unprepared is troubling."
Witt representative Charles Fisher said that the company should prepare for outages of at least half a million people going forward. Malloy agreed. The governor also said that it was clear that CL&P didn't do a good job of coordinating the manpower it needed to fix the state's damaged electrical grid.
Finally, the report says that CL&P's internal projections didn't line up with its public pronouncements. The company told customers that it expected power back after a week, while its internal models said it would take three days longer.
"They came to us they told us they believed that that was the target. I don't think they were lying. I think they thought that they could marshal resources, that things would come in, that it would all come together."
Fisher, the report's author, says a few things need to happen going forward.
"Before you say when you're going to have power back, to make
sure you have a good assessment of how bad the damage is. And, two, then to thoroughly vet what your public statement is going to be about when power will be fully restored."
The report also found that the public sector emergency response planning needs some work, too. Malloy says he has asked his staff to create a master plan to lay out how the state should work with municipalities and utilities during similar future events.
For WNPR, I'm Jeff Cohen.
