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Michele Skalicky talks with City Utilities Spokesman Joel Alexander to get an update on power outages in the city.
How many customers remain without power at this time?
As of Wednesday morning, we're looking at about 3800 customers that are still without power. We're seeing that number start to drop pretty significantly here, so as we move out thru the day we're feel like we're going to make pretty good progress with those outage numbers and getting more people online today."
You have several crews out working. How many crews are out and I understand they're working pretty long shifts.
At this point we have 75 tree crews and 45 line crews, and how that translates actually into manpower, that's roughly 325 to 350 out working around the clock to help us restore power to our customers. We're working 16-hour shifts day and night.
You're at a point now where you're predicting a time of completion. How long do you expect it will be before everyone is back on?
We're saying, worst-case scenario if things stay as they are, we're predicting sometime later on Friday on Saturday that we predict we'll have everybody who is without power at this point who can receive power, we should have them back on. That said, we are looking at some weather conditions that may deteriorate later on Thursday into Friday, so we're really going to be working the hardest we can throughout today trying to get people back on. Also, we have some fronts coming in tonight that are going to bring some winds in. They could possibly hamper the efforts that we make, but we're going to put everybody out that we possibly can today.
I know in some cases, the homeowners are going to need to make repairs to their homes first. Can you explain that?
When we say we'll restore power to people who can accept it, we mean you may have an issue on your house, particularly your weatherhead or where the power entry is into your home. If we can see that there's physical damage to the weatherhead or to that entry point, we can't reconnect power until you've had that taken care of by a licensed electrician. That's a possibly safety issue to your home and to your belongings, so we're not going to take that chance. We'll notify the homeowner of that if we see that or if the homeowner knows there's a problem, they need to take care of that before we reestablish that service.
I understand that there's been damage to the distrution system in the southern part of the city. How extensive is that damage?
We have a couple of areas in the southeastern and kind of south central portions of the city and the far south that on the distribution lines we're actually going to have to do some pole replacement. We've got a half dozen to a dozen poles where the structures have been damaged due to falling debris. It's kind of similar to what we saw in January 2007 but not nearly as extensive, but we have a couple of areas that we need to do some major repairs to. The problems that we're having is how we get to those major repairs. A lot of these are in suburban areas of our service territory that's taken a little bit longer to get into due to access issues and just basically downed limbs, trees that's taken us awhile to get back into and of course the ice conditions and the weather conditions have not made it easy the last couple of days to get into those areas.
What should people do if they experience a power outage and, along with that, what is the procedure now for reporting an outage and will people actually get to talk to someone when they call or will they need to leave a message?
The procedure now if you have a power outage is to call City Utilities at 863-9000. Call that number, report that outage once and it'll be entered into the system, and we're going to get crews out there to take care of your outage just as quick as we possibly can. It is an automate system and we know that people would really probably prefer to talk to a live operator or a customer service representative but, to do that, unless it's a real emergency, really bogs down our system and, in turn, bogs down the response that we can make to our customers who are without service. So, if customers can go ahead and enter their outage thru the automated system, that's really going to expedite the process. An issue we have, since January 2007, we've done a few modifications to the system as much as we can that allows us to take in roughly 1100 calls an hour. At some point we have to cut back on a few of those incoming calls so we can use some of those lines to make what we call call backs to make sure people are really back on with their power. Before we have a crew leave an area, we're going to call back to that area that we've been working in to make sure that everyone that has reported an outage is back on. And so we end up having to use some of those phone lines for 2 purposes, ingoing and outgoing. In the next few months we will be switching over to a high volume call system that, while not on premise, that will allow us to take about 30,000 calls an hour in the event of another electrical outage. We're almost to the point where we're going to implement that. We're about 2 to 3 months away from doing that. And that's really something we've been working on for quite a while even prior to the January '07 storm but since that hit we've really been working to move it along as quickly as we possibly can.