In New York, the damage was less than anticipated, and residents, as well as the teams charged with rebuilding after the storm, chalked that up to luck. The storm’s trajectory kept it farther north and west from New York than projected, and the snow it dumped on the major cities was largely the light, dry and fluffy variety that doesn’t drag down tree limbs and power lines. But the easier-than-expected aftermath was not only due to the good grace of Mother Nature. The excellent preparation by the utilities and the contractors ensured a faster, more efficient recovery.


The devastation and cleanup efforts of storms, such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, have been educational for electrical contractors and led to new efforts focused on prevention and mobilization. With the kind of preliminary work done to prevent excessive damage, utility companies say they have seen a reduction in work following many storms, while proactive efforts to organize response teams has made the reconstruction faster and more efficient.


Let’s fast-forward to the storms in the Northeast this year. Within a week, power was restored to nearly every business and residence, and electrical contractors (ECs) that traveled as far as a thousand miles had returned to their homes and workplaces. And that, the ECs say, was because they were poised and ready to quickly rebuild where needed and mobilize to new areas if necessary.


Hundreds of contractors took part in the cleanup. The storm hit central and eastern Long Island to southern and eastern New England with the most ferocity. In Long Island, up to 2 feet of snow fell in places; Massachusetts saw up to 3 feet from Jan. 26–27, 2015.


For National Grid Utility, 28,000 customers (mostly in Massachusetts but also in Rhode Island and New Hampshire) were out of power by Monday night as the storm hit, while only 650 of its customers in New York, 400 in Pennsylvania and about 1,000 in North Carolina lost power. Most of the outages were near Cape Cod, Mass., and on the island of Nantucket, Mass., a community especially vulnerable to storms approaching from the south or east.


To help ConEdison, E-J Electric Installation Co., Long Island City, N.Y., kept crews on standby for its own state’s Orange and Rockland counties for about 10 hours, but the comparatively light snowfall and reduced winds led to them being dismissed. 


E-J Electric also sent 12 crews to Rhode Island, where they spent the next three days repairing downed or damaged poles and conductors and restoring residential services. When the crew was on-site Monday evening, only 16 customers were out of power and the storm was still rolling in, according to Joseph Rubino, E-J Electric’s general manager of the Transmission and Distribution division. Power outages in the tens of thousands cropped up through the night. By Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 4 p.m., most of those power connections were restored.


E-J Electric has a storm-preparedness protocol in place and a staff member dedicated to predicting storm repair needs and mobilizing crews, tools, equipment and trucks, Rubino said. In this way, E-J Electric can ensure it is as pre-emptive as the utilities need it to be. Historically, contractors waited to hear from utility companies after the storm had passed, and they often didn’t get requests out until they assessed the scope of the damage. Today, ECs and utilities are much more proactive. 


E-J Electric reaches out to utilities in affected areas once they identify potentially damaging storm patterns, and the contractor offers services based on crew availability. Utilities then will request them for staging or put them on standby. 


Marcus McPhee of McPhee Electric Ltd. LLC, Farmington, Conn., sent many line crews to storm-damaged areas, only to end up waiting in a staging area. In fact, he said, the company has seen a quiet year with nothing more than such staging events, in part thanks to Mother Nature, but also due to diligence by utilities and contractors. Of course, one large storm could end that trend. 


“There’s been more and more preparation work done by utilities,” he said, adding that this includes barricades around substations; preventive maintenance, such as tree limbing; and other protective efforts. 


E.S. Boulos Co., of Westbrook, Maine, made its way south to Hyannis, Mass., with six two-man crews. It brought five bucket trucks and a digger derrick. Once at the site, Massachusetts utility company NStar needed contracted crews, as well as its own men, on hand for reconstruction after the expected storm. E.S. Boulos’ linemen set themselves up in a hotel staging area to wait out the storm. NStar called them out to start work, but E.S. Boulos’ crews found that they couldn’t get more than 1,000 feet from the hotel before local authorities sent them back inside, as the conditions were not yet safe enough for reconstruction. 


“Travel conditions were terrible,” said Rick Hanlin, director of utilities for E.S. Boulos. Winds were sustained at 40–50 miles per hour and gusting around 80 mph, while the tide surged and snow and ice fell. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards require that line work not be performed when wind is stronger than 35 mph. 


Once the storm passed, E.S. Boulos crews spent three days replacing power poles, putting primary power lines back in place and reconstructing secondary power services to homes. The work was fast, efficient and nearly uneventful, Hanlin said. Storm cleanup didn’t used to be that way.


“Organization is better, especially in heavily populated areas,” he said, adding that the improved organization is taking place on both the utility and private contractors’ side. “We keep project management staff on hand, looking out ahead” 


When storms are forecast, often a thousand miles or more from their location, the company will then send rosters to the utilities they work for and offer specific help.


National Grid Utility spokesperson Jake Navarro confirmed that utilities have increased their storm-preparedness efforts. 


“The way we were preparing was as if several hundred thousand customers lost power,” Navarro said. 


Such preparation helped ensure that outages were resolved as fast as possible. The company set up about seven staging areas throughout its coverage region, mostly in Massachusetts.


Nantucket, where 14,000 customers lost power, was the hardest hit. Several submarine cables feed the island, and the storm did not damage them. However, heavy waves and flooding damaged a substation, and the resulting mechanical problem occurred around 7 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 27, shutting down power service to most of the island. 


National Grid sent five internal crews and 40 additional contractor crews onto the island. Workers repaired utility poles damaged by wind—equipment had already been prestaged 
on-site—so that only the trucks needed to be transported to the island by ferry immediately before and after the storm. The substation was in operation again by 5 p.m., Tuesday and brought power back on in phases, beginning with the hospital and then the high school, which was serving as an emergency shelter. 


Contractors came to New England from as far away as Canada, Georgia and the Midwest, Navarro said. 


The utility followed up the repair work with aerial patrols of transmission lines over its entire coverage area, and, although a series of snowstorms passed after the blizzard, no extensive outages occurred.


Navarro said the minimal number of outages did not mean the storm was insignificant. In fact, Worcester, Mass., received its highest one-day snow total of 34.6 inches.


“I attribute it to the investments we’ve made in our system,” he said, adding that this includes risk of knocking down lines anywhere in the network. 


Some other private enterprises have developed ways to get customers powered up more quickly or temporarily. For example, while most single-family dwellings don’t have their own generators, a hybrid or electric car can act as a generator if power can be drawn from its battery. Princeton Power Systems—the creator of bidirectional electric vehicle charging stations—has also developed a way for vehicle-to-grid systems to be set up at refueling stations, making cars into power generators. The system draws energy from a car’s battery and can then push that energy onto the local power grid long enough to provide some interim power until the power infrastructure is repaired.


When a monster storm zeroed in on the Northeast in late ­January 2015—the first major storm of the year—preparation got underway for cleanup and rebuilding of damage that hadn’t happened yet. Utilities set up staging areas; contractors’ crews loaded their bucket trucks and headed toward New York, Boston and beyond. Without knowing the scope of the storm’s effect, utilities braced for up to 1 million customers without power, and the utilities and contractors planned well before any infrastructure ever felt the force of the wind, snow or ice.