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Changes in the way repairs are assigned and Gabrielle's early arrival made restoring power slow for some.
By BRYAN GILMER and STEVE HUETTEL
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 18, 2001
The electricity had been off for 48 hours on Martha Feaster's block when a neighbor told her Sunday about a dozen bucket trucks parked at a nearby shopping center.
Feaster, who had thrown away $200 worth of spoiled food at her home on 10th Avenue S in St. Petersburg, drove to a different lot and saw 10 or 15 other repair trucks from companies hired by Florida Power Corp. She said the crews were "sitting there drinking coffee and sodas."
She marched up to one of the men.
"I said, "My lights have been off for 48 hours, and I am upset,"' Feaster recalled. "He said, "Ma'am, we'll follow you home."'
Within two minutes of arriving, the crew had reset the circuit and restored power.
"Two minutes!" Feaster said.
Florida Power and other electric utilities that serve the Tampa Bay area, the North Suncoast and the Sarasota area insisted Monday that Feaster's experience was unusual. It would have been nearly impossible, they said, to restore power to the last customers faster than they did on Sunday or Monday.
Tropical Storm Gabrielle struck Friday, leaving more than 900,000 Floridians without power at some point. That total included about 400,000 Florida Power customers.
By Monday night, Florida Power and other utilities said everyone who reported an outage Friday had power.
Florida Power officials acknowledge that their repairs were hampered by more than weather. A change in policy made since the utility merged with Carolina Power & Light slowed repair crews, one dispatcher said. Crews sent from North Carolina and elsewhere also couldn't communicate with Florida Power crews by radio and were unfamiliar with the area.
The storm moved into the area faster than expected. It knocked down an extraordinary number of drought-weakened trees. It caused isolated outages that took hundreds of service calls to fix, company officials said.
"I was generally pleased with the effort," Robert Sipes, hurricane emergency control center coordinator for Florida Power Corp., said Monday. "I was disappointed that the planning and the forecast didn't synch up. When the storm changed its mind, we were somewhat in a mode of catchup."
Sipes said forecasters originally predicted the storm would hit Sunday, so the utility called for extra crews to arrive ahead of the storm Saturday. Instead, the storm hit Friday morning, and reinforcements didn't roll into Orlando until 15 hours later.
Ed Mobsby, a Florida Power dispatcher in Central Florida, said that since the utility's merger with Raleigh, N.C.-based Carolina Power & Light, recovery efforts have been hindered by a new policy. The new procedure moves the job of assigning repairs from dispatchers to line supervisors.
Supervisors aren't experienced at sending crews to problem spots, he said. And crews sometimes must drive to get a new assignment instead of being dispatched by radio.
Sipes said that in large storms with lots of outages, dispatchers alone can't handle the volume, so they send batches of reports to line supervisors for individual assignment. Out-of-state crews didn't have radios that were compatible with Florida Power's, he said, so they had to be dispatched in person.
The crews Feaster encountered told her that process often left them in the parking lot waiting.
Even without glitches, fixing lines after Gabrielle was tougher than fixing them after a thunderstorm, where one repair to a lightning-struck circuit will restore service to 1,000 customers, said Ross Bannister, a Tampa Electric Co. spokesman.
"The wind and the rain hammered the trees and caused lots of damage," he said. "We were only picking up customers only one, two, five at a time."
Florida Power & Light Co. spokesman Bill Swank added that flooding prevented crews from immediately fixing many lines around Bradenton and Sarasota.
In Hernando County, Withlacoochee River Electric spokesman Ernie Holzhauer said he has been with the company for 32 years. He has seen higher winds but never so many fallen trees, he said.
"Our staffing was adequate," Holzhauer said. "It was the task itself that was so great."
Monday, Feaster filed a complaint with the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulates the state's monopoly utility companies.
PSC rules require that "each utility shall ... attempt to restore service within the shortest time practicable consistent with safety."
PSC Commissioner Terry Deason said Monday that the commission hasn't yet decided whether to investigate.
"During the restoration effort ... we try not to interfere," he said.
A large number of complaints like Feaster's might prompt an investigation, he said. But he said an exemption to the rule for hurricanes could apply to the tropical storm.
Pinellas County Emergency Management director David Bilodeau said it has taken three days to restore power in each of the three tropical storms he has seen in his 15-year career here.
"Whether that's acceptable or not, I don't know," he said.
- Times staff writer Robert King contributed to this story.
Customers who think their electric company took an unreasonable amount of time to restore service after Tropical Storm Gabrielle can complain to the Florida Public Service Commission by calling (800) 342-3552 or visiting www.floridapsc.com on the Internet.