Our Views: LIPA is the real disaster

The Island Now

Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island with its devastating winds, more than a quarter of a million structurally sound homes and businesses remained without electricity. That is inexcusable.

 The response to this disaster by the Long Island Power Authority has been completely inadequate. The delay caused Congressmen Peter King and Steve Israel and Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano to call on the federal government last week to take over the restoration of power.

But even if every light is on, the fact remains that LIPA failed in its responsibility to the people of Long Island.

LIPA management failed to prepare for a storm of this magnitude, even though it learned from Hurricane Irene how vulnerable the power grid is on Long Island.

 Before going further, we want to make it clear that our problem is not with the crews that worked night and day to turn the power back on. At the end of their 16-hour shifts, many of these workers returned to cold, dark homes. Our concern is that these crews were badly managed and dealt with a crisis brought on by LIPA’s inability to deal with the results of a major storm.

At a press conference last week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the utilities virtual monopolies run by nameless and faceless bureaucrats. “We’re going to have to look at a ground-up redesign,” he said.  “The utility system we have was designed for a different time and for a different place. It is a 1950s system. … They have failed the consumers. The management has failed the consumers.”

Adding to the frustration of the Nassau County residents shivering in the dark was the ongoing failure of LIPA to communicate. LIPA should have been holding regular press conferences and in the age of social media it could have been tweeting hourly about where crews are working and when homeowners could expect the lights to come back on. People living without electricity could have gotten the messages on their smart phones.

 In an open letter to Michael Hervey, the chief operating officer at LIPA, Village of Kensington Mayor Susan Lopatkin, who is president of Great Neck Village, writes, “As we have told you many, many times, ‘bad’ news for our residents is better than no news. You must figure out what you are doing and give us and our residents the details. ‘Expect 7 to 10 days and then 90 percent will be restored by Wednesday evening’ is not news.”

But in Great Neck and throughout Nassau County, there was little or no information coming from LIPA. And that made residents furious.

When every family is back in a warm home with the lights on, a thorough investigation should be conducted into the failure of LIPA both in its preparation for and response to Sandy. For more than two weeks one of the most prosperous counties in America lived like a third-world country.

What we have learned has been mind boggling. LIPA’s power outage management system is currently directed by a 25-year-old mainframe computer. The system is not capable of playing Angry Birds let alone tracking island-wide outages, and systemic failures to keep up with basic tasks like replacing rotting poles and trimming trees near power lines. The limits of this antiquated system became obvious a year ago after Hurricane Irene.

Rotting and damaged utility poles that are still standing need to be replaced and branches need to be cut back before the next storm strikes. If LIPA doesn’t have the resources to do this in a timely fashion, call in the National Guard or federal resources. But get it done.

In addition, substations throughout the system equipped with outdated technology must be upgraded.

Hervey said LIPA has a new outage-management system but it has not yet been implemented. And he said many of the issues identified in a state report released last June had already been identified by LIPA. Note he said “identified” not “addressed.” But these problems were first “identified” in 2006.

Last year LIPA officials thought that Hurricane Irene was the storm of the century. It wasn’t. And Sandy might not be.

Cuomo summed up his frustration, “I believe the system is archaic and obsolete in many ways. They are basically one of the last monopolies. “If you are unhappy with the utility company, who do you fire? Who runs it? Who owns it? Where do you get them?”

Sandy must become a wake-up call. The larger problem is that LIPA and other utilities are monopolies not accountable to the millions they serve. This has to change.

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