Photo courtesy of Progress Energy
Here’s the note from Progress Energy spokesman Scott Sutton. Scott, thank you for this.
Hi Ash,
This is Scott from Progress Energy. Thanks for helping us keep people informed about the restoration process. We understand the difficulty of not having power and the gravity of going without it in these temperatures. That’s why we prepared for the storm and are working hard to restore power as quickly and safely as possible.
Our crews are working around the clock in treacherous terrain to repair severe damage to our system. In many areas, we have to rebuild the grid and perform work that would normally take weeks in better circumstances. We have made more than 144,000 customer restorations and our goal is to have 98 percent of everyone back on by tonight.
We view every experience as an opportunity to improve. Once the operational challenge is over, we’ll take a look back and identify what we can do better next time. We’ll make adjustments to our plans and pass the feedback to other utilities as well.
We appreciate the many positive, supporting comments on this blog and the understanding and patience of our customers. You might also be interested in some recent pics I uploaded to Flickr that illustrate the challenging terrain and conditions that face our crews as they try to make repairs. These were taken from by our helicopter crew.
Also, a note about the above comment. Our phone lines were never down. In fact, we fielded more than 180,000 outage reports from customers this weekend. Perhaps he is referring to French Broad EMC, which did lose its phone system.
Be safe and stay warm.
8 Comments
My family was without power or water for five days; because our house is back in the woods and also at the end of a line, we were one of the last to get power. Not having power wasn’t so bad, but because we have a well which runs off electricity, we didn’t have water either.
Although it took a long time to get our power back, we had people up here almost every day cutting up fallen trees and working on the lines. A crew of 6 Pike workers were the ones to finally restore our power, and not only did they have to hike up our long, icy driveway, but once they got to the top, they were still very nice and friendly, reassuring us we would have power in a couple of hours. Every time we spoke to Progress customer service (which was lots!) they were friendly, thorough, and helpful.
I was amazed at how fast power was restored to our area, considering some of the hard to reach lines and the vast number of outages. I am especially thankful to Pike, but I think the whole thing was handled really well.
The hard work and the heroism of the crews aside, Progress’ planning seems very poor. Many incidental reports (gathered by me) are that the repairs were done in a very arbitrary fashion, with whole areas — some concerning very simple repairs, such as flipping a breaker switch — left undone, sometimes by outsourced crews who needed simple approval from Progress to fix — approval which came too late or not at all. I spoke to several crews who told me "We just do what we’re told," while no human was available on the phone. Who’s making these decisions? I even went to Progress’ headquarters near the Farmer’s Market, was met at the door by a security guard, and told ‘We’re doing everything we can. Go home." It all just added up to ‘We’re doing it our way, deal with it.’ Candler came online very late, just because … it’s Candler. Draw your own conclusions …
What Real Reporter said!
There does seem to be a lot of undue complaining about this. Be thankful Progress Energy isn’t Duke Power, which let me go without power for 2 1/2 weeks, yes WEEKS, a couple years ago in SC. On well water. No water or anything for that long can make you go crazy. I think Progress Energy is doing a good job getting everything back up and running, remember, we do live in the mountains, I’ll happily trade a week without power to get this beautiful view. Just like if I lived by the beach, I wouldn’t bitch about hurricanes, there’s always a trade-off.
Depends on who you are and where you are and your circumstances whether a power out is an inconvenience or a serious problem. I don’t believe anyone is faulting or criticizing the line crews who do a terrific job in horrible conditions!
Is underground utilities a new concept? Even if only the main lines were underground much of this weather problem (rain, ice, wind, snow) would be significantly diminished. Sure would be nice if Prog Energy would replace last minute heroics with good planning. Or is that kind of rational responsibility only expected from individuals?
It is obvious to me in reading or hearing complaints from people who lose electricity that some of these folks are soft. I’m not making light of the fact that outages during winter can be much more dangerous because of the bitter cold, especially for the elderly and people with illnesses. Most folks are not in those categories. They are able-bodied, healthy and well. Lost electricity is an inconvenience, but that’s mostly what it is. So pick up a book instead of the remote. Better yet, go out and see about helping your neighbors. Just be glad you’re not the utility worker who has his ass hanging from the top of a pole in the wind and cold trying his best to make sure you are not inconvenienced. Regardless of whether these workers are "contract help", they are still working in cold, miserable conditions to make sure we are warm and dry so we can get on the computer to bitch about how we’re having to wait too long for our electricity. There were areas during the blizzard of ’93 which went without power for a week…in case you forgot.
Since they "broke the company up" a few years back, and fired a significant number of their local line crewmen (and outsourced the rest to a private (local) company), "Progress Energy" has not been able to keep up with the weather around here: in the Summer it’s thunderstorms and wind damage (and hurricanes) that takes them forever to restore power; and we see what has happened this Winter (so far) …. and predictions are for a wetter than normal season this year …. hmmm cold temps and more wet than usual…..
I don’t envy those workers. They have a huge job and I think we all owe them a debt of gratitude and respect. I think they’ve done a good job in very difficult circumstances.