Downgrade Henri? An easier struggle.
Craig Hallstrom, the guy in charge of keeping the lights on in Connectcut as Eversource’s president of regional electric operations, was feeling optimistic.
Tropical Storm Henri had made landfall in Westerly R.I. and was leaving less devastation than predicted. It was Sunday afternoon and he was about to deliver a briefing to Gov. Ned Lamont.
“It’s been a better day than I thought it was going to be when I went to bed last night,” Hallstrom said by phone after speaking with the governor.
Better than he thought, thankfully without twothirds of the state plunging into darkness from border to border, as the worst of the forecasts had predicted. But that still left a challenge as Connecticut skirted disaster: Should Eversource, loaded up with crews at the ready, stand down and let everyone know we were dealing with a lesser event than we had expected?
The company had issued a warning and planned for a so-called Level 2 emergency — meaning 625,000 to 870,000 customers could be out of power for up to 21 days, and that didn’t even include the Avangrid United Illuminating territory, which looked to be on target for a hard hit.
Eversource had crews from Alabama, some western states and even Canada to ensure adequate handson-deck. The company had set up major staging areas at Pratt & Whitney’s East Hartford campus and the Crystal Mall in Waterford.
Even before the storm weakened Sunday afternoon, Eversource had indications the damage wouldn’t be as severe as that forecast. For example, just before midnight on Saturday night, a new outage prediction model at UConn – based on a close collaboration with Eversource -- estimated about 25 to 50 percent of customers would be affected by the storm.
The previous day, the University of Connecticut model, using a town-bytown estimate of “trouble spots” such as downed wires or broken poles, had estimated the massive power outages, based on a direct hit from the storm.
“At this point, we expect to be on the lower end of the range,” spokesman Mitch Gross said in the mid-afternoon.
Hallstrom, in that interview after speaking with Lamont, said the storm would probably go back down to a Level 3 when it was over, “maybe even a lower level event.”
Hallstrom added, “This is not going to be a 21-day event…I don’t think it’s going to be an 8-day event.”
Despite all that, Hallstrom and Eversource did not, in the middle of the storm, issue a downgrade.
Lamont lifted a ban on motorcycles, empty trucks and tandem trailers along I-95. The eye of the storm was past Hartford, headed due-north as opposed to a previous prediction, which showed the path of the storm going more west over the corner of Connecticut.
Fewer than 33,000 power outages had been reported at that point — a fraction of what was expected — and many of the utility company’s crews were already on the scene restoring power and responding to reports of downed trees.
So, why not announce a downgrade?
Several reasons. First, the levels are used more as a planning tool so that the company can make sure to hire adequate crews, Hallstrom explained. With the storm in progress, there was no operations need to change the level.
Second, Henri has been a very hard storm to predict because its speed and direction have changed. A turn across Connecticut, as some models still showed on Sunday afternoon, could bring devastation. The power company used multiple forecasts, models and on-the-ground observations.
“Weather is not a perfect science,” Hallstrom said. “We have to be conservative.”
That was all the more true considering the power company faced sharp criticism for failing to predict that more than 800,000 customers would lose power in Tropical Storm Isaias one year ago.
Lawmakers held Eversource responsible, and the state’s Public Utility Regulatory Authority said Eversource’s preparations and response to the storm were inadequate. A law was also passed through the Connecticut General Assembly, which allows the state’s Public Utilities Authority to impose stiffer penalties if outage responses are lacking.
And finally, unlike the relatively low-rain Isaias, with winds that brought down trees and limbs, some parts of the state were still expected to get up to eight inches of rain, which could lead to more downed trees because of rains earlier this summer leaving moist earth and soil.
“It doesn’t take a lot of winds for trees to fall over,” Hallstrom said.
“We have a long afternoon to go,” Gross said.
By mid-day Sunday, most outages were concentrated in the eastern area of state. In Canterbury, nearly 95 percent of the company’s 2,300 customers were without power. More than 1,200 outages were reported in Lisbon, where 64 percent of customers had no power.
North Stonington was another affeceted area, with about 38 percent of the 2,644 customers there affected.
Ahead of a 1 p.m. briefing to the public, Lamont was not as concerned about storm surge as the potential for flooding.
The response from Eversource stood in contrast to this time last year in Isaias. In that storm, the company’s municipal liaisons failed to update town and city leaders, who were left in the dark, literally and figuratively. Remote work in the pandemic made matters worse.
This year, Hallstrom said, “We’re on site. We’re seeing each other face to face. The communication is much better.”
“They’ve got a new system and a new set up,” Brookfield First Selectman Steve Dunn said, echoing other town officials. “It seems to be working very well because if there were any problems, I would have heard about them immediately.”
The Eversource update Sunday evening was a a lot easier than the state had expected 24 hours earlier.