The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
⏩ State lawmakers hit Eversource CEO on storm response at hearing,
More than three weeks after a tropical storm knocked out power to most of Connecticut, state lawmakers on Thursday lambasted top management of Massachusetts-based Eversource Energy, venting the frustrations of ratepayers and charging that a slow response and poor communications were unacceptable.
Members of the legislative Energy & Technology Committee questioned Eversource CEO Jim Judge for most of the day, recounting week-long outages caused by downed trees that blocked driveways, streets and entire neighborhoods for more than a million customers.
Remarks by Judge created the headlines, of course — for example, even though Eversource isn’t required, like utilities in other states, to provide reimbursement for spoiled food, Judge hinted the company might provide something to customers, eventually, maybe.
But for lawmakers locked out of the state Capitol for most of the last six months, the hearing was a rare chance, ten weeks before Election Day, to tee up on the head of a company that, in their view, did wrong by their constituents and needed to be called to reckon.
“The current regulatory environment is not working for Connecticut,” said State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, whose town experienced about 98-percent outages and 200 roads blocked.
Thursday’s hearing was not the first time a CEO was hauled in to appear before the General Assembly after a crisis. But it was the biggest public backlash against a stateregulated electric monopoly since the August and October storms of 2011.
Then as now, communication was a big sticking point.
“There was great frustration, maybe it was a communication issue, that there were not more make safe crews available,” Steinberg said, referring to the crews that identify live wires. We saw four, five, six crews, some of them out-of-state crews, sitting around often at our schools for six, seven, eight hours, without any assignments, most of the time just looking at maps.”
State Rep. Bill Buckbee, R-New Milford, said there were obvious breakdowns in communications between the utility and local officials, with more than 90 roads closed due to downed trees and live utility wires.
“I think that communication breakdown is paramount to the entire process,” Buckbee said during the virtual committee meeting, which started about 10:30 and was still in process more than six hours later.
Judge said that under the conditions, Eversource restored service in “record time.”
“Would Eversource consider a rebate to their customers as a gesture of goodwill for the delay that was, again, while you say it’s been record times, for a township to go five days without hearing anything and getting anyone in the town, that’s not success, that’s failure as far as we’re concerned,” Buckbee said. “Is there anything that Eversource is looking to do to make things right on their own without being told they have to?”
“I think the issue comes down to the mistakes that a company made,” Judge said. “You mentioned that communications is a breakdown and we’ll take a look at just how broken we were as we do our post-storm review and file this report .... and we’ll make a decision at that time.”
Judge said that the company would file the report with the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority by Sept. 8. “We didn’t do everything perfect and communications is something that we desperately have to work on.”
During his daily news conference from the State Capitol, Gov. Ned Lamont said that reimbursing customers would be a sign of good faith.
“Look, you could wait for regulation, you can wait for the legislators and see what they make you do,” Lamont said. “If I was the CEO of a company like that, I would say look, I know the incredible stress people are going through. Maybe it was a hard storm, but we all know we could have done better. And it cost some of these folks a lot in terms of financial, in terms of food and in terms of stress. I would definitely lead with a refund. I think that would be the right thing to do.”
During the committee session, State Rep. Raghib Allie-Brennan, D-Bethel, recalled an elderly couple, one blind and the other in hospice care, was stuck without power or their landline phone for days. He saw a Twitter post from their caregiver and was able to get local police to help them.
“If I didn’t catch that tweet who knows how much longer that couple would have suffered in the heat without medication and food,” Allie-Brennan told Judge.
At an elderly housing complex in nearby Redding, the power outage stopped the flow of well water. “This is a life-safety issue,” Allie-Brennan said. “I’m asking you, Mr. Judge, what do you tell that couple? Those 300 seniors, that first selectman, about your failure to restore electricity not only 48 hours after the storm, but eight and nine days later?”
“What I would say is I’m sorry they had to go through the ordeal that they went through,” Judge responded. “I think that our team dealt with a devastating storm as effective as they could... It’s heartbreaking in many ways in terms of what people had to endure here. I wish that we could provide perfect power. I really do, but it’s just not a possibility at this stage of the technology.”
“It was to my thought relatively chaotic,” said Rep. Stephen Meskers, D-Greenwich, stressing that the corporate response seemed too positive for the occasion, amid the actual “frustration” of ratepayers. He said local crews that were prepared to remove trees, faced the inability to shut power because of the failures of Eversource.
“I understand this was a cost-driven decision,” Meskers said.