OG&E crews find challenges, rewards in Puerto Rico
A simple gesture by a young Puerto Rican left a lasting memory with an Oklahoman who went there to help restore power to its residents.
Rick Berg said the boy, who lived with his family in a neighborhood where an Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. had helped restore power, approached him as he was working out of his truck — making calls and answering emails and texts.
The boy carried a big sack that he hardly could lift as he handed it to Berg through the open window of his vehicle.
It contained a two-liter bottle of pop and six bags of chips.
“I said no, we were fine, but he kept trying to hand it to me. He finally did, so I took it,” said Berg, who is a construction services manager for OG&E.
“So, I saw his grandmother was on the porch, and I got out and I thanked her. It was evident this family didn’t have a lot,” he said.
That, Berg said, epitomized the most pleasant surprise that he and 60 fellow OG&E team members experienced during their 20 days of working on the island to help its power authority recover from Hurricane Maria.
“They have been five months now without electricity, and I couldn’t imagine going through that in Oklahoma,” said Berg, who led the team and returned to Oklahoma last week.
A lot of love
“The people aren’t mad. They love us, they
love OG&E and they love the Thunder," he said. “They hug you, feed you lunch, breakfast and supper, and they won’t take no for an answer.
“You insult them if you ... try to pay them. Things like that? We don’t get that everywhere we go. They are wonderful people.”
Berg, a veteran lineman who’s worked for OG&E for more than 40 years, said OG&E’s mutual assistance mission in Puerto Rico is the 45th such event he’s participated in that took crews outside of Oklahoma to help other electricity providers recover from storms.
He said he’s been involved with OG&E crews who have worked to restore power up and down the East Coast, as far west as Denver and along the Gulf Coast.
Along the way, he’s seen just about every type of damage an electrical distribution system could experience from events ranging from ice storms to major hurricanes. Damages in Puerto Rico were about what he expected to see, he added.
But what made this trip unusual was that the utility had to ship its vehicles to the island before going, making sure they were loaded with plenty of supplies to support the crews once they were working.
Also, crew members were pulled in to get needed shots and to go through various orientations to prepare them for hazards they might not see working in Oklahoma, such as Africanized bees, large snakes and copious amounts of poison ivy.
Berg traveled to the island Jan. 15 to get his crew’s first jobs organized before they arrived five days later, and he stayed behind for a few days as well to help get a replacement crew of 62 workers back on the job.
Together with crews from Dallas-based Oncor and Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, they started their response in the island’s Arecibo region (on its north coast, about 50 miles west of San Juan).
“When our crews landed on Jan. 20, we had a game plan, knew where we were going to start and knew what materials we needed,” and that enabled them to begin restoring power to affected homes and businesses that same day, he said.
A lot like home
Berg said another pleasant surprise was the willingness of Puerto Ricans to make their homes available as hotels for the visiting utility workers.
There were 200 who needed places to stay, and were provided them, he said.
“I was in a threebedroom home that had three baths and showers ... they rented it out to us just like a hotel. It had air conditioning, dogs, chickens, ponies, had it all right there, just kind of like being at home,” he said. “That was really special, that people would give up their homes to give us a place to stay.”
A less pleasant surprise, though, was the numbers of vehicles on its roads.
“There are 1,100 people per square mile in Puerto Rico, and they all have a car, I think,” he said.
“First of all, there were no signal lights, and then when they got signal lights, red lights didn’t mean stop, and neither did stop signs. A threelane road really was 5 lanes, when you counted the shoulders.”
That created some interesting situations when OG&E’s big trucks met other trucks or even cars on one-lane mountain roads.
“There is no way to prepare us here in Oklahoma and Arkansas for that kind of driving,” he said.
Another first for the utility, he said, was its use of drones just this week to both identify power poles perched on mountain cliffs and to drop rope crews used to pull line to those locations.
Berg said he was proud of his crew’s performance, adding he knows OG&E’s current assistance team, which includes one of his sons, will provide the same level of service to the island’s power authority.
“When we talk about mutual assistance, none of the companies anymore are large enough to handle these major events by themselves,” he said.