In the early morning hours after Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida Power & Light already had teams on the ground working to assess the damage and beginning to restore power to more than 400,000 customers. FPL reported 95% restoration within five days and now reports 100% restoration to customers who can receive power.
Sandra Averhart recently invited J.T. Young, FPL Northwest Florida Vice President and General Manager, to the WUWF studios to talk about the utility's hurricane response.
Sandra Averhart: Let's start with just a General overview of FPL's response to Hurricane Isaias. Reflect back on how things went.
J.T. Young: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. And one of the things I will say is that at FPL we have responded to a number of storms. Isaias was not necessarily different in the sense of us being prepared and responding. But we do say that every storm, every hurricane, is different. And certainly, Isaias has had a very different makeup than many storms that we've seen in the past. But our team, we prepare year-round for storms, and we do. In May, we do a mock storm drill, which we did this year as well, where we prepared, used a full week to prepare, and simulated a storm, affecting customers in our service area. And we went through every aspect of what we would do in response to that. We do that every year, wanting to make sure that we're ready to respond when a storm comes. And so when this one came, we actually began our storm planning specifically for Isaias. You know, days before the storm actually hit. We started, you know, doing our logistics and planning and staging and pre-staging those types of things with crews and coordinating mutual assistance and whatnot. Of course we do that days in advance so that we're ready to begin restoration as soon as it's safe to do so.
Averhart: So you say crews were out bright and early? Well, maybe even in darkness early.
Young: Yeah, we did have a rapid response crew that was able to get out really before daylight following the storm. We, of course, had brought in over 17,000 men and women from 29 states to help with the restoration, because again, in advance of the storm, not knowing exactly where the majority of the damage would be, we just tried to strategically place them in what we call processing sites so that we can get those folks in, processed, and then mobilized to where the storm damage is, where we need to be working. And so that's what we did. When Saturday morning rolled around, we began to roll trucks. First, we have to do, of course, an assessment in terms of where the damage is so that we don't just send folks blindly out and not knowing exactly what to do. So we do send folks out to help patrol and determine where that damage is. Because our goal in restoration is to initially ensure that our generating facilities are up and running, that our large transmission system that transmits the electrons, that those are up and running as well. Because we need to be able to serve the critical loads that we have. Those 911 centers, emergency centers, police, fire, hospitals, critical, you know, water supply, those, those are the critical customers that we must make sure we get those back on first so they can provide needs for the for the rest of us.
Averhart: What damage did you find? Initially, we thought the heaviest or more significant damage would be around Destin. Turned out to be more on the west side. Focusing on Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. And what kind of damage did you find mostly when damaged tree damage falling on lines, what did you find?
Young: Clearly, you know, Sandra, to your point, first of all, for scale, just for scope here, we found that about 435,000, or about 85% of our customer base in the Panhandle were adversely affected by the storm. So we have a significant number of customers that were affected across the Panhandle. And to your point, when we looked at, well, where's the damage, the greatest, we did have, you know, certainly did have customers impacted in Panama City and Fort Walton and Destin and Okaloosa County, Walton County. But yes, the most significant damage was here in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, where we found that the biggest culprit here was trees because of the previous week's storms that we had, or rain that we had. We believe that created environments with this, better than 100 mile an hour wind, 120 mile an hour window. We had a lot of damage to our facilities and infrastructure due to trees. And when trees blow down on wire, oftentimes they snap poles and bring poles down and transformers and other equipment that we have to repair, replace. In addition to that, that tree damage does damage to many of the customers' equipment at their homes, whether it's their electric panel or what have you. And so we found that to be the case, as well. But the concentration of damage, the greatest damage, and those customers that were, that we were bringing back on as we did our restoration, it took the longest to bring back on were those in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.
Averhart: And are we at 100% today?
Young: We are today; we are. For those who can take it. I mean, you know, there are customers who, for whatever reason, had some significant damage. Some homes have been damaged beyond repair or damaged to the point where it's not safe for them to take power. And so, of course, for those we're ready to restore, I've been in contact with customers and others here recently where we may have to coordinate with an electrician, meet the electrician on site because of the nature of their service. We may have to do some testing before. So, we're at the point where, though we are essentially restored, customers are back, with the exception of those that have had some pretty significant challenges.
Averhart: For those who find themselves or have found themselves in that position, what are the first steps that they need to take if they have damage at their home?
Young: Yeah, the biggest thing for customers to recall remember is, following a storm like this, of course power goes out. I lost my power for a few days as well. But I think it's really important for customers whose service comes in, especially overhead, to their home to make sure that service drop or that line that connects from our pole to their home is intact. And for those customers who have that type of service, there's of course a meter that's on the side of the home. And then above that is what we call the weatherhead, where we make the attachment and where we connect. Want to make sure that's intact and that there's no damage there. Because if there is, even when we restore power to our network, power may not be able to get to that person's home because of that damage. And so we want to make sure. Customers need to make sure that, as we found in some cases, customers were waiting for us to restore power, and we couldn't because of that particular situation. So it's really important for customers to recognize that in the event that that does happen, customers will need to get a licensed electrician to make those repairs before we can successfully reconnect them for service.
Averhart: And that's the first call that you need to make to a private electrician.
Young: Yeah, licensed electrician. We can, we certainly will be glad to come out and look and make sure that there's nothing else we can do. We'll be glad to do that. And that's at no cost. And we can come out and look at it. But if we can't make the connection safely, that's when the customer would need to make that call. And I will say, and I'll just continue to remind our customers. I've said this a few times, but for customers who've had that type of damage, if they've got situations like that where they've had to have electrical repair done, we are offering assistance through our Care to Share program. And customers can go to fpl.com/assistance, and they can be eligible for up to $2,000 in grant money to help them with that, as well as bill credits, for some who would qualify. And we're actually proactively providing $200 bill credits to about 10,000 customers across our system. So over $2 million in available assistance that we're making proactively to customers who previously received any federal assistance for bill payments. And so we realized that restoration, which we do with the power, is one piece of recovery. And we know recovery takes much longer, and recovery takes other things. And so we're here to assist with that.
Averhart: Let's go back to restoration. You had prearranged for other companies' crews to come in. What were those numbers?
Young: Yeah, so at the end of the day, we brought in 17,000 from 29 different states. And I mean, far away — New York; I was out and speaking with a lot of these folks as they came in Missouri, other states. And we do that through what's called a mutual assistance program that we have with other utilities throughout the country. And of course, as we plan for that, one of the things that we start looking at the week the storm is coming this way is trying to forecast, well, where this storm is going to go. Because if we're going to request assistance, we want to make sure that we're requesting it from places where the storm is not going, because if it's coming to a certain area, they're not going to release crews to come to help us. Likewise, we do the same thing. When storms affect areas that don't affect the Florida region. We also send our crews to assist. And so we do that routinely. So, yeah, we had 17,000 men and women from all over, and we staged them across 15 different sites across the panhandle where we had them available to be as close as possible to where they would need to do the work. And it's a really incredible logistical effort to make all of that happen. Takes a lot of planning and execution. And remember, we're bringing in folks just like I'm sure other entities will, but we're bringing in folks and sending them out to do work in areas in which they're not familiar. But these folks are highly trained to do what they do. That's tree crews, that's line folks, Folks that do construction on lines both overhead and underground. And they bring a lot of equipment with them as well.
Averhart: Correct. Maybe we've talked about this, but if we could drill down a little bit to some of those areas that had the most significant damage and what kind of damage that was? Was it trees on the line? You tell me.
Young: Yeah, predominantly. Predominantly. If you drive around the area and I've been around a lot since the storm, what I've noticed and I've lived through more hurricanes than I can count starting, you know, I mean I've been doing hurricane restoration since the 80s, with utilities. And the first recollection of a storm I remember in this region was Frederick, or maybe even Betsy before that. But I definitely remember Frederick. But I'll tell you, this storm was a little different because when you typically after a hurricane, there's a lot of roof damage from the wind and maybe there's a surge, from storm surge impacts, adverse impacts from storm surge. This storm, while there was some of that, this storm was predominantly a wind-impacting storm on the western side. That's where we saw the majority of our damage. And absolutely, from the trees. I would say it was predominantly that. When you think about it, we saw that we had about 138,000 outages that we avoided because of the technology that we've deployed, where the technology could sense outages and reroute power; that worked great. Some customers that might have otherwise seen an outage didn't. But in many cases it wouldn't have mattered. You know, there's no such thing as a hurricane-proof electric grid. We know that very, very well. But the things that we did with regard to hardening really paid off in many areas where we see we had the hardening infrastructure. And so I would say that we had about 15% over in this area, of our system that was hardened. We had over 2,000 poles in general that we had to replace. But not one pole — not one pole that was hardened — either steel or concrete had to be replaced. And so that tells us that there is certainly value when we harden our system. It makes it more resilient. Not necessarily completely unaffected, but resilient to these kinds of things. And we saw where our underground network was. They performed about 14 times better than our overhead areas. And so we are in the process of, of course, making some more infrastructure investments across the panhandle, and really across our system, to ensure that we have more infrastructure that's hardened.
Averhart: And so when you're talking underground, this is as new subdivisions come online, is that what we do?
Young: We do, but there are also. There's a program we have called the Storm Secure Underground Program. And we actually are in certain neighborhoods in Northwest Florida; for example, we have over 150 miles of, neighborhoods that we've done that we've placed underground through that program. More to come. But that's where we've looked at reliability data, and we've seen where there's an opportunity for us to make these investments. And those investments certainly pay off when we make those investments to put those neighborhoods underground.
Averhart: We talked about challenges. What were some of the most challenging aspects of your response to Hurricane Isaias?
Young: Yeah, candidly, we have. Well, of course we always have challenges. And listen, I want your listeners to know we also have a lot of lessons learned from every storm, and we make sure that we come together with that information. In fact, we'll be doing that in the next couple of days and sharing that information so that we can get better the next time. But a number of challenges in the area of communications — I will say one of the things that we learned, when a storm comes in and we have tools and technology available for customers to be able to know about their particular service, we did have some challenges around accuracy of that information, making sure that if a customer's power was out, we want to make sure that they know it's out. And that information was not as accurate as it should have been. I mean, that's the nature of the beast, right? When we got 435,000 customers out, the system is challenged. So we're working to improve that to make sure that system is absolutely more accurate. The other thing that I would say is when we looked at our initial assessment around the damage, we made an assessment that we could bring 95% of our customers that were impacted back sooner than we really could. We really didn't know the extent of the damage, and we had to adjust that. And so that I'm sure caused some frustrations with expectations. And then the other thing is, when we talk about our customers that were affected by the storm, we talk about those numbers. Subsequent outages continue to occur. And so there are a lot of times when we would say we've got 80% or 70% or 85%. And again, we did have 85% of our original customers back within three days and about 97% of our customers back after four days. But one of the things that happens were subsequent outages that occur. And we need to be better at communicating that information as well so that customers get a more clear picture of what actually is happening with the system. And so those are just a few things that we found to be challenging in addition to the challenges in the field of actually being able to get wire back up when trees, massive trees, have fallen over these lines and having to rebuild, not just restore, but having to rebuild a lot of lines again with 2,000 poles that had to be replaced; there was a lot of rebuilding that was going on with our system.
