Clark Public Utilities has sent 11 employees — two line crews and one superintendent — to New Jersey to assist FirstEnergy in restoring power to its customers. The crews left Portland last Thursday, Nov. 1, on a chartered flight to Newark, N.J. with other local utility workers. The crews are serving as relief for New Jersey crews, using FirstEnergy equipment, according to Clark Public Utilities.
HOBOKEN, N.J. — For utility crews racing to restore power to residents of this waterfront city that have been sitting in the dark for a week, the task is both mundane and monumental: Clean a bunch of gunk off electrical equipment with rags and cleaning spray.
That’s the way it has been across the Northeast, as crews clean, replace and fix the equipment needed to get the lights back on for millions of customers who lost power when Superstorm Sandy blew through.
In Hoboken, the salty, filthy floodwater of the Hudson River swamped a substation that relays power to 10,000 homes and businesses. It worked its way into switches and in between wires. It washed over the hunks of copper and silver capable of handling 26,000 volts of electricity. It fouled everything below a perfectly straight line of dirt on all the boxes of circuit breakers and transformers on site that marked the crest of the flood.
Clark Public Utilities has sent 11 employees -- two line crews and one superintendent -- to New Jersey to assist FirstEnergy in restoring power to its customers. The crews left Portland last Thursday, Nov. 1, on a chartered flight to Newark, N.J. with other local utility workers. The crews are serving as relief for New Jersey crews, using FirstEnergy equipment, according to Clark Public Utilities.
“It’s getting the crud off,” said Mike Fox, a Public Service Electric and Gas Co. engineer who was supervising the company’s substation restoration. “It’s nothing earthshaking, but it’s a lot of stuff.”
Sixty-seven thousand utility workers in the Northeast are working day and night on tasks they are familiar with: putting up telephone poles, stringing wire and replacing transformers. But Sandy’s storm surge added another dimension by attacking the utilities’ internal equipment. Switching stations, substations and underground electrical networks were inundated in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Hoboken and elsewhere.
But it’s the sheer volume of work that is making the power outages last so long for some. At the peak, 8.5 million homes and businesses were without power. A week after the storm walloped the Northeast, 1.4 million customers remained in the dark, mostly in New York and New Jersey. Getting the power back on for all of them will take at least another week.
Frustration is turning to anger and despair. The air in the region has a winter chill and another storm is approaching. Some without power see neighbors with twinkling chandeliers even as they still use candles.
Fox gets it. He has been taking cold showers and using a flashlight to shave every morning before setting out from his house in Westfield, N.J. to the substations that need repair. On Sunday, his neighbors started an email exchange suggesting they complain to PSE&G in hopes of getting service back quicker.
“I had to head them off at the pass, and explain why it can take so long,” he said. “Every day people get a little more strained and stressed. I’d be losing patience too if I had time to.”
Local workers have plenty of help: Utility crews from as far away as the West Coast started streaming toward the Northeast in their bucket trucks even before the storm hit. But feeding, housing and outfitting thousands of out-of-state workers has its own challenges.
Utilities have agreements with local hotels to house workers, but as the extent of the damage became apparent, and homeowners abandoned their powerless homes for hotel rooms, a housing crunch developed.
A crew from Cincinnati-based Duke Energy that specializes in underground electricity transmission arrived in New York on Wednesday to help Consolidated Edison restore power to lower Manhattan. Getting a hotel in New York was even tougher than advertised.
The crew was first sent to a Girl Scout Camp near Rye, N.Y. After that was the Marriot Marquis in Times Square. But instead of getting a room, they were asked to “hot bed,” military style: they’d get a bed for 8 hours before they had to pack up and leave. Next stop: The Hudson River. They were put on a dinner cruise boat called the Hornblower Infinity docked at Pier 41 that had rows of cots where tables and chairs once sat.
Finally, on Saturday, they were moved — for good it seems — to the Hudson Hotel, a boutique luxury hotel on 58th Street. Not a bad upgrade.
PSE&G said it is using 4,000 out-of-state workers to erect at least 1,000 new poles in its service territory. As of Monday, the company had restored service to 1.3 million of the 1.7 million who lost power in its service territory. It has also restored power to 78 percent of the gas stations in its region, which should ease the long lines seen at stations that had both power and fuel.
