Two snowflakes side by side may be beautiful and two snowballs amusing, but two snowstorms a day apart can be devastating to a modern electrical grid.
Such was the situation Central Hudson faced in the last week of February when consecutive winter storms blanketed the region with up to three feet of snow, creating the worst outages in the company”™s century of operation.
By the time the storm past, 150,000 Central Hudson customers lost their power, representing half of the utility”™s customer base.
The scope of the emergency led to unprecedented scale of response, said John Maserjian, Central Hudson spokesman. More than a thousand workers were in the field making repairs at the height of the outages, as Central Hudson early-on called in mutual aid assistance from companies as distant as Michigan.
The state Assembly Energy Committee and Public Service Commission will hold hearings on the outages to draw lessons and to determine if Central Hudson could have responded more effectively and if there are avenues to avoid outages from future storms.
“I am going to take a hard look at the factors that have contributed to the severity of these outages,” said Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, chairman of the body”™s energy committee. “A little over a year ago, my hearing on the December 2008 ice storm brought to light several issues surrounding communication, utility staffing and coordination of outside crews brought in to assist in the response. I am very interested in hearing how the lessons learned then were used to mitigate the impact of this storm, if at all.”
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Central Hudson officials are confident the utility will come out fine when the probes are complete. The storms, starting Feb. 23 and a second storm starting Feb. 25, brought heavy wet snow to widely separated sections of Central Hudson”™s service territory that spills across parts of seven counties in heavily treed terrain across the mid-Hudson Valley.
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The utility opened centers for distribution of dry ice and bottled water and put up a website that detailed the outages and gave the latest information available on restoration of service and other matters.
The scale of the situation was daunting, Maserjian said. At the height of the outage, 80 percent of customers in southern Dutchess County, Putnam County, Orange County and southern and western Ulster County were without power and there were states of emergency declared in Putnam and Orange counties as well as in some towns. Thirty-seven miles of  Interstate 84 were closed on Feb. 26 as well as sections of the Thruway.
“It was difficult traveling to the many areas where there was damage,” said Maserjian. “Our repair crews were supplemented with tree trimming crews that were essential in accessing many areas where the main roads were impassible.”
Ten transmission lines and 30 major distribution circuits were knocked out of service during the event as were thousands of individual connections to neighborhoods and eventually to individual homes and businesses.
Now comes a review of the response and a tally of the cost. “I don”™t know what this storm will actually cost,” said Maserjian. “We won”™t know that for some time.”
He said the utility set aside $5 million annually for repairing storm damage, an amount he said was derived from actual repair expenses of the previous four years. He said that for comparison, the ice storm of December 2008 that cut power to 75,000 customers ultimately had a repair bill of $8.5 million but said that figure does not necessarily translate to the new storm. All hands on deck as the utility responded. “Even our accounting staff was in the field doing support work,” Maserjian said.
