Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
WE TOUR IRMA’S AFTERMATH WITH FPL’S CEO
Though steamy outside, I felt a chill in the air Wednesday after stepping into Florida Power & Light’s command center at Zoo Miami, one of 30 staging sites for its military-like effort to restore electrical power after Hurricane Irma.
My relationship with FPL had grown a little tense since I penned an editorial two days after the storm, saying the company should better communicate with its customers.
We want more timely and accurate updates about when the lights will come back on, I wrote. We want a power-outage tracking website that works. And we want to know why mostly tropical storm-force winds wiped out power to 90 percent of our homes and businesses, especially after we helped finance a $3 billion hardening of the system and an upgrade to smart-grid technology.
No one likes to be criticized in public, I get that. But as editor of the Sun Sentinel editorial page, I see my job as speaking up for our community, much like the New Orleans Times-Picayune did with a frontpage editorial after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees. “We need help!”
My criticism amplified last Sunday, as a panelist on WPLG’s This Week in South Florida, after host Michael Putney said FPL representatives had declined multiple invitations to appear on the show. “In the absence of communication, people think the worst,” I said. “There should be an independent, outside review.”
Monday, I invited FPL CEO Eric Silagy to visit the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and perhaps take questions from readers. On Tuesday, he declined, in part because of my comments on the show. Instead, he invited me to join him in the field. After some hesitation, I agreed to go.
And as generally happens when people talk face-to-face, you better understand the other person’s point of view, you begin to see things through their eyes and you discover things are always more complex than they seem.
It had now been nine days since the storm left South Florida, and eight days since it left the last of the 35 counties served by FPL. The company had restored power to 99.9 percent of its East Coast customers. And Silagy, wearing a hard hat and yellow reflective vest over casual clothes, looked less like a corporate executive who pours over P&L statements and more like a coach who’d just won a championship game.
Silagy (Se-LAH-Gee) spent four and a half hours with me, and exhausted my questions. I found him to be forthright and reflective. He accepted responsibility for FPL’s communication failures and said his team was already working with IBM on fixes. He shared his frustrations with certain cities, particularly Coral Gables, and people who made the job more difficult. He spoke often about personal responsibility, while recognizing the challenges that face low-income and elderly residents. And while he bristled at talk of benchmarks, he explained why the outage was so great.
Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera was there for a while, too. And with a team of executives in tow, we toured the staging site and learned what it takes to support 23,000 people working — sometimes in jungle-like conditions — across half the state.
It starts before the storm, of course. That’s because post-storm, Silagy, the son of an Air Force pilot, wants every manhour optimized in the field. And staging areas — at fairgrounds, casinos, racetracks, arenas, airports and just about any place with big open space, preferably paved — take a couple of days to ramp up.
As Irma marched our way, Silagy did what utilities do when facing extraordinary events — call colleagues for help. However, East Coast utilities couldn’t help, fearing the storm would also hit them. Others still had crews in Texas, repairing the damage from Hurricane Harvey. Still, more than 16,000 workers — from 30 states and Canada — arrived at out-of-state staging areas in Lake City and Daytona Beach.
The day of the storm, FPL asked that National Guard trucks park around its repair equipment to serve as a buffer. “My biggest issue was Interstate 75 on the Santa Fe River,” Silagy said. The bridge was hours away from being closed because of flooding. Equipment had to quickly be moved south to keep from getting pinned north. “It’s like a military operation. Where are you going to put your folks?”
How do you divvy up work crews, I asked. Before the storm, FPL positioned several thousand workers in Southwest Florida, he said. But when Irma swerved that way, he moved them east. “I needed them out of the path. Southwest doesn’t have as many hotel rooms that are Cat 4and 5-rated. I’m not going to put these men and women in harm’s way. … So when the storm passed, a lot of people here got to work right away. We couldn’t get into Southwest Florida, in some pockets, because of flooding and debris.”
Silagy said crews also are pre-staged “where the population is, the maximum number of people we can get up as quickly as we can. And it’s based on the system itself, where we think we’re going to need the crews based on the landfall of the storm.” Miami traffic jams are a factor, too. “Traffic kills us. I put them in a position where they don’t have to go across town.”
By now, we were walking past tanker trucks. “Fuel is a big issue,” he said. “We pump 200,000 gallons a day. We serve 60,000 meals a day. We distribute 35- to 40,000 cases of water. And 90,000 pounds of ice.”
For workers who can’t get motel rooms, the company has 18-wheelers with 42 beds each, plus chargers for cellphones. One worker brought his CPAP machine. “One guy was 85 years old. We only know that because someone backed into his truck” and a report was made, he said.
At the laundry tent, FPL office workers, using barcoded bags, ensure workers’ clothes are cleaned daily. “They may not be qualified to be in a bucket, but everybody has their storm role and they are all important,” Silagy says. “If they choose not to show up, it’s going to be career limiting.”
The mess-hall tent is stacked with to-go lunches and snack packs with Snickers and Gatorade. “We want them to stay in the field. They work 16-hour days. And if they get dehydrated, they can have a lapse of judgment and lose fine motor skills.”
The recovery effort is clearly good for local vendors, he notes, “if I can count on them and they can execute.” Those that fall short won’t get a second chance. “Some people are good in a crisis, and some aren’t.”
The day FPL hit 4 million restorations — out of 4.4 million outages — it celebrated with sheet cakes from Publix.
“These men and women are hitting the wall a little bit. Four million restored in six and a half days is stunning and I want them to feel good about it,” Silagy said. “They loved it. They’re big and hard. A lot of them are former military. But they were like little kids. Wow, we’ve got cake. Can I have a second piece? This is America. When you go around these sites and see the men and women who have left their families, it warms your heart to see how they pull together and do this.”
Plus, “if you don’t treat the crews well, they won’t come back. It’s the little things, like fresh clothes.”
The money is good, too, money that will eventually be recouped from us, the customers. Crews are paid time and a half, plus round-trip travel time. That’s why close-by workers are preferred. And if you’ve just driven four days from Canada, you’re not as fresh.
“You will see a spike in four-wheelers and Bass boats afterward,” Silagy said. “It’s a big payday for a lot of these folks. It’s why I expect a lot.”
No alcohol is expected, for one thing. Break the rules and you’re sent packing. It happened at the BB&T Center, where a worker who bunked away from his buddies later found his tent propped on the ice. He grew belligerent. Alcohol was suspected.
Silagy brings up safety often. “As we get close to the finish line, like a horse going to a barn, people want to speed things up. I’m worried someone will get hurt.”
“We’ve had one death,” he said. “The gentleman had a heart attack, I think. He died in the parking lot of the hotel. He was 26. He left a family of two.” (After we spoke, another lineman fell to his death from the fifth floor of a Fort Lauderdale parking garage.) Also, on the roads, a woman ran a stop sign and T-boned a utility truck, hospitalizing two crew members, one in critical condition. The woman who hit them died, he said. In another case, someone texting while driving slammed into traffic cones and hit a worker, breaking his leg and ankle.
On the lines, crew members also faced injuries, including a few burns from electrical flashes. Dog bites, too. And one worker got stung by 500 bees. Thankfully, Silagy said, he wasn’t allergic.
“It’s brutal conditions,” he said. “It’s a jungle.”
His biggest crew challenge was finding enough tree-clearing teams to let linemen do what they do. The industry model is two line crews for every vegetation crew. But given Florida’s 12-month growing cycle, he wanted one-to-one. “I couldn’t get it.”
“Every utility in the southeast was short of getting those specialized tree crews, but we ended up doing much better than anybody else. … Georgia Power had 1.2 million out and it was all tree damage. Atlanta got hammered. They had tropical storm-force winds, but significantly less (than here.) Here, we had 70 mph sustained winds. Theirs were 45 mph.”
Aha, now we were getting to the questions on my list.
Why did 90 percent of customers lose power from a storm that in South Florida, at least, had mostly tropical storm-force winds with occasional hurricane gusts? What would have happened if we’d been hit by a Category 4 or 5?
“I’m going to disagree with you a little bit on the tropical storm-force winds,” Silagy said. “When you have a wind gust that hits 120 mph, or you have a tornado that’s going to cause structural damage, or when you have strong tropical storm winds that last for 20 hours, it’s going to cause damage.
“This storm had a footprint that covered the entire state of Florida. The wind impact was 300 miles across. Sixty four counties got hit with hurricane-force wind gusts. Three counties in the Panhandle didn’t. We cover 35 counties, 27,000 square miles. Every customer got hurricane-force winds … and there were a lot of tornadoes. Brevard reported 54 tornadoes, alone.
“Jacksonville is at the opposite end of the state and its port was closed for three days. And the storm was not as strong there. It’s true that we did not get those massive winds, like Cat 4 or 5, but when you blow a roof off a house like I saw north of here, and take it across the road and hit our power lines, that’s pretty powerful. Do I think that’s because of steady winds? I think that house got hit by a tornado because the house to the left and right didn’t have that kind of damage.
“On the southwest coast, where the storm actually hit, I was concerned we would have to rebuild some of our larger transmission lines and large feeder lines, but they really withheld and withstood the winds well. We didn’t have any structural damage. I’m very pleased that we’re not rebuilding, but repairing. We’re going to be completely done by the end of (this) week. I’m thrilled about that.”
Trees, Silagy said, were the story of the storm.
“I think we’re all amazed so many came down,” he said. Part of that’s because we hadn’t faced a major storm since 2005. “This was a big pruning.” Another part is that people — and cities — plant the wrong trees in the wrong places. And if they hit a power line when they topple or a limb flies off, there goes your power.
FPL doesn’t want you to trim trees along power lines. For safety reasons, that’s its job. But it can only trim trees in its easements, which are typically 10 to 15 feet wide. It would like you to trim adjacent trees.
The goal is a trim that will keep the tree out of the lines for six years.
The city of Coral Gables, however, only allows a two-year trim. It has sued FPL over tree-trimming, he said. And according to the Miami Herald, it’s getting ready to sue FPL again for failing to quickly restore power to city residents.
Coral Gables strikes a nerve with Silagy. He agrees its tree canopy is lovely, but look at how many trees toppled in the storm, he says. An FPL arborist says some trees were planted too close together, making their root systems vulnerable to flooding and high winds.
“They fought us in line placement and tree trimming,” he said. “In 2013, they wanted us to stay with standards from 1951 … It’s silly to engage in litigation over this. If you’re going to have more trees, there’s going to be more and longer outages.”
“We don’t want to butcher the trees,” he added. “We try to be sensitive. But people refuse to give us access (to backyard lines) or put their dogs out.”
Last week, a Coral Gables woman threatened to have a crew arrested after tree limbs fell in her yard and were not immediately cleared away, Silagy said. She called the police. When the officer arrived, Silagy said, he asked the crew members’ names and whether they were legal residents.
“They were from Kansas. I don’t know how many hours we lost because that particular person got upset because of tree branches in her yard … We’re going to clean it up. But right now, I’m just trying to get the power back on.”
As our conversation continued, he noted how few power poles went down. In Hurricane Wilma, the company lost 12,000 poles. In Irma, it lost 2,000 — all because of tree strikes, not wind.
But again, with the system so hardened, why so many outages?
“It’s silly to engage in litigation over this. If you’re going to have more trees, there’s going to be more and longer outages.” FPL CEO Eric Silagy