Mike Kirkwood in Burrillville needed just a few minutes to organize crews repairing damage to the town’s electrical system after Tropical Storm Irene. On Block Island, Cliff McGinnes Sr.’s biggest worry was fixing a few burnt fuses. For the leaders of the state’s only two independent electric companies, being small paid off in the aftermath of the storm.
“As a small team we can quickly get in, assess and get right to it,” said Kirkwood, general manager at the Pascoag Utility District. “You get to make those decisions when you’re a small company. There’s less official protocol you have to go through.”
For Kirkwood, it meant quick decisions about when to send crews out and when to send them home for rest. It meant Kirkwood could bring in outside contractors quickly to complement his work force. It meant easy coordination with the local police and fire departments. And it meant just a few phone calls to reshuffle work schedules.
Two days after the storm, the utility had restored power to all its 5,000 customers. At the same time National Grid, the state’s largest utility, had more than 100,000 customers in the dark.
But National Grid had returned electricity to a substation in Nasonville and inspected twin feeder lines that carry electricity from there to Pascoag’s substation. Once those lines lit up, Pascoag was good to go.
The utility’s linemen had worked 16-hour days preparing for their substation’s return. They were driven, Kirkwood said, by a sense of duty to the community in which most of them live. In the field were five linemen, a foreman, a two-man tree crew and the assistant manager of operations. The crews hit the streets on a Sunday morning as the storm raged on.
“It almost chokes me up when I think about it,” he said. “It was this incredible sense of pride.”
On Block Island, there was a sense of more luck than pride. The island never lost power for more than 15 minutes.
“We just got lucky,” said McGinnes, Block Island Power Co.’s chief operating officer.
Just one of the company’s 1,800 customers lost power for more than 15 minutes. And that’s only because a transformer broke. The day after the storm, crews were already repairing it.
McGinnes does not envy National Grid executives who were faced with more than 1 million customers without power spread across multiple states. The utility took days to restore power and faced criticism from customers and regulators about its response to the storm.
McGinnes, however, still wants the island electric grid connected to the mainland. Such a connection might have left Block Island in the dark after Irene, but it could dramatically lower electricity prices for the island.
If the island did connect to the mainland, it would tie into a utility that is looking to – in many ways – operate like a smaller company. Earlier this year, National Grid announced plans to organize itself along geographic rather than state lines.
Executives said the move will save money and make the massive, British-owned company more customer-orientated. As part of the reorganization, the company appointed regional presidents. Rhode Island President Tim Horan became the face of the company in the state after Irene.
He provided updates at media conferences and urged patience and had hundreds of workers deployed.
Meanwhile, Kirkwood was at Pascoag offices, using a borrowed cell phone to call National Grid and ask when the lights would come back on. •
