Last week, Connecticut Light & Power introduced its new chief executive against the backdrop of the season’s first hurricane to storm the US mainland (in Louisiana) and various anniversary post-mortems on Irene, the last hurricane to impact densely populated areas of the East Coast. William P. Herdegen III, comes to Connecticut from Kansas City, where he applied his 35 years of industry experience to transmission and distribution operations. (It was the appalling lack of power distribution in the wake of Irene and a subsequent October snowstorm that got his predecessor fired.) The appointment is the latest in a string of initiatives, upgrades, and investments that are supposed to reassure electric ratepayers and elected officials that CL&P won’t get caught flatfooted again after it left 671,000 and 831,000 customers respectively without power after the two storms — many of them for more than a week.

The many steps that have been taken to foreclose the kind of embarrassing failure that disgraced the utility last year are encouraging in that they acknowledge and do not deny responsibility. But we also understand that these efforts are doing double duty as a public relations campaign to soothe the public’s anger over the property damages, the human suffering, and the overall damage to the state’s economy that grew out of the protracted power failures. In the coming years, power companies up and down the Eastern Seaboard will be wrangling with their respective state regulators over who pays for the consequences of their lack of preparedness — ratepayers or shareholders. It will be hard to get ratepayers and their governmental agents to accept higher rates while they are still angry.

Recognizing this, CL&P has agreed to absorb $40 million of its $110 million in storm restoration costs from last year and put off any rate increase requests until at least December 2014. The shelf life of ratepayer anger, however, is not determined by public relations campaigns, personnel changes, or new initiatives; it is always determined by the next big storm. Nascent tropical depressions, storms, and hurricanes are still rocking in their cradle in the south Atlantic, and the next big storm could be a couple of weeks away, or a couple of years. Whenever it happens, we hope everyone will see clear and demonstrable improvements in CL&P’s response. Only then should we broach the possibility of rate increases.