LIPA acknowledges communications problem

As sporadic outages rippled across Long Island and 165,000 customers remained without power in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, LIPA acknowledged Wednesday that it has failed to provide increasingly desperate customers with the information they are demanding.

Three days after the storm, the Long Island Power Authority Wednesday was still working to get automated calls out to all customers affected by outages, even as more than 358,000 have had power restored. Call volumes early in the week swamped LIPA's phone system. A text-messaging system planned a year ago still wasn't ready for prime time.

Customers say the problems are glaring.

"We're not getting any kind of information at all; it's very frustrating after four days," said Roy Peter of New Hyde Park, who is powering home fans at night with cords connected to a running car.

Beverly Haupt, who works for a Farmingville doctor, said staff got more information from the WBLI radio station. "In an emergency like this, I should at least feel like someone hears me," she said.

LIPA acknowledged the problem.

"Customers expect a lot more information than we were able to give them," LIPA chief Michael Hervey said Wednesday night. "We were doing just gangbusters in restoration, but we haven't been able to communicate to customers the information they expect, which is exact restoration times."

Part of the problem, Hervey said, is that for Irene, LIPA dusted off a two-decade-old plan that called for decentralized dispatch repair operations, effectively creating 30 separate, nearly independently run repair utilities at substations.

The structure speeds repairs, but vastly slows the flow of information about crew locations, worker availability and job completion. It's one reason the LIPA website has more general information about outages than normal, and "progress" is always described as "restoration in progress."

Hervey said LIPA will review and update the decentralized system after the restoration effort ends.

Meanwhile, the sporadic outages seen across Long Island came as crews worked down an expanding list of significant damage sites, temporarily cutting service to some to bring back others, primarily for safety reasons. The dozens of outages per day could last from a few minutes to a few hours, Hervey said. The number of significant damage locations jumped to more than 5,000, from more than 3,000 Tuesday.

But officials Wednesday were sticking to their previous estimate that 90 percent of the original 523,000 outages would be restored by Friday night. It's unclear how long it will take to restore the final 10 percent, some 52,000 customers, who could see power out through the Labor Day weekend.

At a morning briefing Wednesday, LIPA and National Grid officials said repair efforts have seen some 144 miles of electric line replaced, along with 633 transformers. Some 713 poles have been readied to be used as replacements, but not all will be installed, officials said.

For customers whose outages have continued for days, anger and anxiety are increasing proportionately.

Lori Burke of St. James said her family has been working overtime to keep two propane generators fueled for medical equipment and air conditioners for two young children on ventilators. "It's very stressful," Burke said.

The family, which is on LIPA's critical-care priority list, is "always facing the prospect of going to the hospital," Burke said. "All the neighborhoods around us have power, and we don't."

Hervey said critical care customers win tiebreaker priority when crews move into an area. But LIPA also must work repairs outward from area substations -- locations that are fed power from large transmission lines from power plants -- to the end of local circuits. Generally, those at the end of the distribution circuit -- farthest from the substation -- are the last to be restored.

Hervey asked for patience, saying LIPA was "making progress in every community," adding, "We are at the point where large blocks [of customers] are being restored on an hourly basis."