Town, State Officials Target Utility As They Debrief Following Irene

By John Voket

Care and communication seem to be the initial focal points of Newtown’s Emergency Response Team (ERT).

The cluster of local officials and department heads gathered this week at the town’s Emergency Operations Center for their first major debriefing following the destructive forces of Tropical Storm Irene, which flooded dozens of homes, snapped hundreds of trees, and left thousands of Newtowners in the dark, some for as many as nine days.

First Selectman Pat Llodra led the meeting, which assembled officials from various emergency services departments, Social Services, the regional Health District, Public Works, school transportation, and Newtwon Police Department. Representative Chris Lyddy was also in attendance.

“Everyone was asked to reflect on their own work and the work of their agency [during and after the storm], and to share what worked, what didn’t, to focus on how to move forward, and how to address any gaps in service,” Mrs Llodra told The Newtown Bee on September 14.

Of primary concern, she said, were situations that may have left elderly and those in frail health without the necessary services they might require, including sustained electrical power for medical equipment and to keep required medications refrigerated.

“Our primary goal is to be better prepared by knowing who these individuals are, and what they need to remain safe and cared for,” the first selectman said.

This concern along with issues of electrical restoration and road clearing all came under scrutiny under the umbrella of communications.

“The road closures issue was very difficult to manage,” Mrs Llodra said. “We discovered that we need a process with input from both police and public works, and we’ll also be including the Parks & Recreation Department as part of all future discussions.”

To that end, a special committee of Police Chief Michael Kehoe, Town Information Technology Director Scott Sharlow and Public Works Director Fred Hurley has been formed. That trio will formulate, for future storm scenarios, better ways to identify closed roads, or parts of them, and to communicate to residents and crews who need to get into or out of those areas.

“We need to be more specific, and we can use Scott’s tremendous abilities with [satellite digital mapping] to pinpoint trouble spots,” Mrs Llodra said. “Part of the frustration is that roads we found were open at 10 am, were closed by 11 as trees and wires continued to come down.”

‘All Available Tools’

Mrs Llodra said she wants to employ “all available tools” at the community’s disposal to ensure everyone seeking local storm-related information can access it. That effort will begin within a month as a document is prepared and circulated to every home in town with instructions on how to access local emergency information.

She said the town plans to step up its use of regional radio stations, as well as various social networking platforms including the The Bee’s website, Facebook and Twitter networks to keep residents informed and up to date.

“We also want o make sure that anyone who is mobile knows they can always come to the town offices, which we will keep open at least 18 hours a day during emergencies,” she said. “For those who do not use computers or electronic communication devices, they can always come here where they will have a real person they can talk to.”

The first selectman also gathered comments that she will bring to a debriefing with Connecticut Light & Power representatives next week. She said she shares the frustrations of many residents about the various channels callers had to negotiate to try and access meaningful information.

“I understand that CL&P’s demand protocol is to handle restoring circuits affecting outages from highest to lowest, but there were many cases where a simple fix — in one case just pushing a button — that would have restored power to single homes or small clusters of residences,” Mrs Llodra said. “Why should these individuals wait days for a ten-minute fix? Why not release one roving crew for these quick troubleshooting situations.”

Mrs Llodra was also frustrated because she “had to work so hard to motivate CL&P to address the most needy, or those who had compromised [medical or health care] circumstances.” In short order, Mrs Llodra plans to work with the local Health District on a frequently updated log of individuals in town with specific health or medical concerns to be sure they receive priority attention if required.

“By utilizing the Health District, we can maintain that information while applying the privacy protections afforded under HIPAA [a 1996 federal act that protects individual’s proprietary health information] for those who are most at risk,” Mrs Llodra said.

Other Post-Storm News

In other post-storm-related developments, State Representative DebraLee Hovey called on CL&P President Jeffery Butler to extend a $150 credit to those customers who were without power for an extended period of time following Hurricane Irene.

In a letter to Mr Butler, Rep Hovey asked for the customer credit for those who had food spoil or experienced other financial loss due to the length of time many residents were without power.

“Many of the residents in the communities I represent were without power for many days,” wrote Rep Hovey. “They understand the severity of this storm and that power restoration takes time, however, what is disappointing, is the lack of accurate information shared. We frequently feel that we have been left in the dark and neglected as other parts of the state have enjoyed speedier repair and restoration times. Eight days for full power restoration is not a satisfactory timetable.”

Hovey also asked CL&P to provide detailed plans on how they planned for Irene and would plan for such storms in the future, and how response times would be improved by the company, as well as information on any plans the company has to bury more lines to prevent such outages.

Conversely, a Quinnipiac University survey of more than 1,200 state registered voters released September 15 showed respondents approve 61–32 percent of the way the state’s utilities handled the response to Irene, with consistent scores among all parties and among men and women.

Even people who lost power approve of the utilities, except for a 55-41 percent disapproval among those without power six days or more. Utilities restored power in a “reasonable” amount of time, 67 percent of voters say, while 28 percent say “it was too slow and there’s no excuse.”

One day earlier, Governor Dannel P. Malloy said state transportation officials must remove trees, limbs, and vegetation near state highways more aggressively following extended power outages triggered by last month’s storm.

Most trees in Connecticut are large because of their advanced age. H. Dennis P. Ryan, an urban forestry professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says nearly 70 percent of Connecticut’s trees are between 60 and 99 years old.

State regulators authorized Connecticut Light & Power, the state’s largest utility, to spend $19.6 million a year through 2012 on tree trimming.

Hearings And Reviews

State lawmakers have scheduled two public hearings on Connecticut’s response to Hurricane Irene. Four committees of the General Assembly are planning to hear from representatives of utility companies, workers, municipalities, and members of the public at the hearings on Mondays, September 19 and 26.

The hearings were announced by House Democrats. House Speaker Christopher Donovan said the hearings will help the state be prepared for the next major storm.

Gov Malloy has also appointed a panel that will review how the state, municipalities, and the utilities responded to Irene, which hit the state as a tropical storm August 28.

That State Team Organized for the Review of Management of Irene, or STORM Irene assessment team, comprises a group of people with diverse professional backgrounds in the military, disaster relief, municipal government, nonprofit, and labor sectors.

They will review the performance of the state and its partners — including the utilities and municipalities — in terms of the preparedness and response and recovery efforts related to Tropical Storm Irene. To ensure that this review encompasses more than just the most recent event, STORM Irene members will also be tasked with looking more broadly at the state’s disaster preparedness and response apparatus.

On the utility’s side, it was announced this week that William Quinlan, a longtime executive at CL&P, was appointed to lead the company’s effort to analyze the response to Tropical Storm Irene and enhance communications with elected and municipal officials in the 149 towns it serves.

“One of the things we heard from towns is that we need to look at better and different ways of communicating information to them, and I think that really triggered this initiative,” Mr Quinlan said September 14. “What we’re trying to do is take the things that worked really well in this storm and apply them to all the towns.”

That will put Mr Quinlan in the eye of the post-storm storm, along with his boss, Jeff Butler, president and chief operating officer at CL&P. The heart of the plan, so far, is for CL&P to hone the town liaison system it put in place for Irene, in which each city and town has a CL&P manager acting as its point person.

“This is the first major storm where we’ve had a formal town liaison program, so we’re still trying to work out some of the issues that came up,” he said. “I do think we need to work on our ability to communicate our business in terms that a town can understand,” such as how many crews are in town and where they will work and when.