O&R VP of Operations Tarpey Addresses Response to Irene

Orange and Rockland Utilities Vice President of Operations James W. Tarpley expected his company's response to Hurricane Irene to be questioned.

"When you have a storm like this, you are not going to satisfy everybody as quickly as they want to be satisfied," Tarpey said. "The best we can do is set expectations and tell our customers to be prepared. Our priority in the very beginning of the storm is to do the damage assessment, to cut and clear and try to make it as safe as we can for our employees and the public. Because of that, we don't really get into the restoration as quick as you might expect."

Tarpey will be among those representing O&R at a hearing being held by the Rockland County Legislature's Public Safety Committee Tuesday, which will focus on evaluating the utility company's response to Hurricane Irene. Legislator Ed Day (R-New City/Pomona) has said he wants to hear O&R's assessment of its own performance.

"I think overall our response to Irene was pretty good," Tarpey said. "There are a lot of lessons learned that we have out of an event like this. An event like this probably comes once or twice every couple of decades. It really does test everything we do to our system and how we ready ourselves for an event like this.

"We were able to get 95 percent of our customers up by that Thursday at 5 p.m. The last customer was actually on four hours less than a week (from when the storm hit)."

Patch spoke with Tarpey Friday to get his take on O&R's actions, including what he felt the company could improve upon, in relation to a storm that knocked out power to 40 percent of its customers.

"I've been here for almost 40 years," Tarpey said. "I've been here through all the storms. I have a lot of experience in seeing storms coming. This one scared me. At the time, it was still a Hurricane. We were talking about as much as 50 percent of our customers being out of service for days and possibly weeks. We anticipated flooding. We anticipated trees down. We anticipated wires down. We had all of that."

One thing O&R did not anticipate was the volume of phone calls. Problems with calls to O&R being dropped or getting busy signals have been the biggest complaint about the day the storm hit.

"We had a number of issues with our phone system with a lot of our customers getting busy calls," Tarpey said. "To put things in perspective, back in 1999 with Floyd, we had 146,000 customers out of service and in the first three days, we got 64,000 calls.

"The first day of (Irene), we actually had about 108,000 phone calls. We had 25,000 hits to oru.com to report outages or to check on the status of the outages. We had 45,000 mobile app hits. That's 176,000 attempts to contact us."

He said that through the week, O&R received 200,000 phone calls. The company normally receives 800,000 in an entire year.

A big part of the change is technology, with many more people having cell phones or other wireless devices. Tarpey said that is something O&R is working to better deal with in the future.

"One of the things we learned out of this is we need to do more now with the way technology is being implemented by our customers," Tarpey said. "By Tuesday of the storm, we actually doubled the amount of calls we could handle and the busy signals went away."

Tarpey said the company is continuing to work on upgrading its phone system to better handle a large volume of calls.

"I can tell you right now we have taken steps to double our capacity," Tarpey said. "We're not going to stop there, because there may be new technologies we can use to improve them even more. We thought we didn't need those things, but as a result of the storm, there are lessons learned."

Among the other complications were streets closed due to downed wires and flooding, making it more difficult for crews to get around. There were also over 800 "flood cut" calls, in which a customer asks service to be turned off because water is rising to a dangerous level in their home.

Bringing in extra personnel was also an issue. O&R brought in extra crews from as far away as California and had most of them ready to help by the day before the storm. They continued to bring in help during the week and had a total of 124 line crews, 70 tree crews and 36 service crews from outside their own regular employees. That was part of a total of 1,230 people working to restore service, most of them working 16-hour shifts that week.

"I wish we had more crews form the beginning," Tarpey said. ""One of the difficult things is to get mutual assistance when the entire eastern seaboard is predicted to get hit. Everybody is holding on to their crews and we had to reach out to crews from other areas."

Though O&R targeted repairs to areas that would help get power restored to the most customers first, Tarpey said safety was the priority. There were no injuries among O&R workers despite the conditions.

"We had no injuries, no vehicle accidents through the entire storm, which is one of the best things," Tarpey said. "Unfortunately, we had an incident where a couple of members of the public did get electrocuted. that matter is still under investigation.

"It goes to show you how dangerous power lines and gas lines are. We do our best to tell folks to stay away from those things."

Tarpey said he understand customers being frustrated, especially early on when crews were assessing the damage and making sure conditions around the wires were safe first, then leaving before restoring power. Also, on the day of the storm, crews were able to get out into the community, but repairs were limited because workers cannot go up in "buckets" to effect repairs until winds are below 40 miles per hour.

Tarpey said he had his own frustration while following the storm.

"The storm hit us at about 1:30 in the morning on Sunday and the winds didn't die down until about 11 p.m. Sunday. That's almost 24 hours. When the winds are above 40 miles per hour, we can't safely put our employees up in a bucket to make repairs.

"One of the most difficult things is to watch the system you worked so hard to build and to maintain and to withstand some of the stomrs we get in our systme, to see it literally ripped apart. You have to be patient. You have to be able to start to assess the damage and start to respond to circumstances as they hit you."