AG eyes utility’s power restoration efforts after storm
The attorney general’s office — which led the charge to force National Grid to pay nearly $19 million for its pitiful response to Hurricane Irene in 2012 — is keeping a close eye on the company as it struggles to restore power to parts of the Merrimack Valley, where thousands of people are still in the dark.
As of 7 p.m. last night, more than 23,000 National Grid customers in Massachusetts were still without electricity after a powerful tropical storm that lashed the region with galeforce winds Sunday night knocked out power to more than 250,000 people.
“Our office has been monitoring the outages reported in Merrimack Valley and Essex County and plans to follow up with communities about restoration efforts,” AG spokeswoman Jillian Fennimore said in a statement.
In 2012, then-Attorney General Martha Coakley pushed for massive fines against National Grid and other utility companies after hundreds of thousands of people were left without power following Hurricane Irene and a freak October blizzard the previous year. The state Department of Public Utilities ultimately slapped National Grid with a whopping $18.7 million fine for not properly preparing for and responding to the storms and for communicating poorly with local officials.
Daniel O’Neill, a utility expert who testified in the 2012 complaint against National Grid, said DPU can audit utilities’ responses to storms, and that the AG’s office of ratepayer advocacy can also investigate.
Utilities first need to properly anticipate storms and prepare an adequate response to the expected damage, O’Neill said, which can involve reaching out to outside contractors beforehand. Then they need to focus on assessing the damage, dealing with downed wires and devising a plan to get as many people back online as quickly as possible.
“When a utility is faced with this kind of storm, they’re trying to balance mobilizing an expensive workforce ... and being caught with their pants down because they didn’t pull the trigger soon enough,” O’Neill said. “Second-guessing requires having all the facts — what they knew and when they knew it — and then you can assess whether the judgment exercised in that case was appropriate.”
National Grid spokesman Robert Kievra said the utility prepared for the storm “with a level of staffing consistent with our extensive history responding to weather events in New England,” but winds were higher than initially predicted, prompting calls for additional crews.
The company, which currently has 600 crews working across the Bay State, said some teams came from as far away as Alabama and Florida.