LIPA's lessons from Irene

With the power back on for everyone who lost service in the wake of Irene, tempers should be cooling, if a bit more slowly than homes and refrigerators.

The frustration felt by the approximately 500,000 Long Island Power Authority customers who lost electricity after the tropical storm's strike on Aug. 28 was understandable, particularly for those who suffered for close to a week before their power was restored. That anger, though, should never have been directed at repair crews, who were working long, dangerous shifts in an organized and sensible fashion to get the electricity back on as quickly as possible.

In one sense, reaction to the outage is a reflection of the way we live now: We're much more plugged in to electronics and the services, like cellular and Internet, that we receive through them. This makes going without electricity for even relatively short periods (after Hurricane Gloria in 1985, power was out for some Long Islanders for 11 days) highly disruptive and disorienting. That dependence on all things wired and wireless isn't LIPA's fault, but the organization will have to understand how much it has ratcheted up the stakes.

However, another driver of anger at the authority -- its confusing and sporadic communications with customers who suffered outages or were left in unsafe situations due to downed power lines and trees -- was LIPA's fault. The authority seems to have chronic public relations problems, and poor communications to customers last week were just another symptom.

Now that the storm is behind us and the response is being assessed, a frank evaluation of communication protocols must be included. Social media and the Internet have drastically changed the way people get information in just the last few years, and LIPA, which had some success with Twitter during this storm, needs to continue to find better ways to use both new technology and old to get information to its ratepayers.

We also need to assess what more can be done, without spending an exorbitant amount of money, to harden the power grid's infrastructure against weather events like, and worse than, Irene. The hope that all the power lines on the Island will someday be buried is unrealistic, both because of the cost and because of the higher water table in some areas. But what if we buried some? What if we eliminated trees near the most vulnerable power lines? What if we moved the most vulnerable transformers? What could be done if we sought, with expert help, a plan to make things, via a variety of methods, not perfect but better?

Right now, while trustees are debating LIPA's future, and National Grid's contract to operate plants for the authority is nearing an end, it's also worth asking what kind of contract and what kind of provider will serve Long Islanders best.

There's always room to improve, and LIPA's response to Irene showed areas where it must. That said, the organization, in restoring nearly every outage in about a week, did what it said it would, and the best it could. Nobody likes to be without power, but sometimes, and particularly with weather events, there's just no one to blame.