A big ice storm has left many of us in MI without power. I live in the largest city without power, where the most outages occurred, and I am watching other places get restored one by one, but we still don’t have power. (going on 4 days now). How do they decide who gets power back first? I thought we would get restored rather quickly since we live in a more populated area, but others who are in smaller suburbs, and even some in rural areas have power back and we don’t. Our whole neighborhood was out, and now several streets near us have power back, but we don’t.
I know that if a power line gets knocked down, they go there first because it’s dangerous, and that some companies and buildings (like hospitals) take precedence, but does anyone know how they decide after that?
Simply, they “trace out” the lines, starting with the big ones (transmission lines), and then the smaller ones (distribution lines).
I say “trace out,” but I’d think that in most places it’s computerized, so they can tell “at a glance” where problem areas are. A line down on a transmission or distribution line will mean no one past that point has power. Fix that line, and just power just starts flicking on all over the place (farther down the line–unless there is another interruption).
Individual homes with outages are the last priority. One reason is that they don’t always get flushed out until the entire neighborhood is back on.
No - I’m posting from work. Actually, I found out we got power back just a few minutes ago, but I still wonder why random houses out in areas with fewer outages got restored before our area. Hospitals and such were restored the same day, big business and government buildings were on next day. Maybe our problem was more complicated to fix.
During the big NE ice storm of '98 I was living in a small rural town. We were hit hard by the storm. However, I had the good fortune of living on the same block as 1) the post office, 2) the police station, and 3) the city hall. So I only lost power for about half a day. Some people I knew who lived out in the country, on the other hand, were without power for the better part of a month!
The above is correct. Major emergency facilities have priority whenever possible. They try for the biggest lines and circuits to get the most bang out of their workers.
But after that it can get very complicated. Individual houses can vary for many reasons. In our area, power lines run down the back lot line so that residential streets are not blighted by the lines. Very nice, except that back yards are full of trees that will fall on these lines during ice storms and there is no way to get large equipment into people’s back yards.
Crews are often brought in from large areas to work on major ice storms. This sounds good in theory, but in practice each utility has slightly different procedures and practices. A utility rep has to accompany each out-of-town crew, which spreads out the knowledgeable locals and the out-of-town crews don’t know the area as well. So you may have 500 crews working instead of 50, but some will be very much faster than others in getting the work done. Or even finding where the problems are.
Circuits are very often not as logically situated as residents think they are. Next door neighbors can be on different circuits.
Some areas may be just inaccessible due to downed trees.
Underground lines are a lot more trouble to get to than overhead lines.
And so on and so forth. It’s grueling, house-to-house work often in appalling conditions even after the storm goes through. (Try repairing a line covered in an inch of ice while wearing thick protective gloves while icy sleet is falling on you.) Utility crews are very unsung for the good that they do.
Used to work at a bakery back in the power “shortage” days. Don’t know about restoration, but on power curtailment due to shortage, hospitals were last to lose it, then bakeries because bread is a “staff of life food.”
