In this interview:
- Saturday's storm caused a power outage affecting about 25 percent (140,000) of MLGW customers. About 8 percent (35,000) are still without power as of Monday afternoon.
- The utility is focused on getting schools back online so students can return to class tomorrow.
- McGowen says the utility will first handle outages that affect the largest number of customers and then attempt to deal with smaller-scale outages as the week progresses, with a goal of having most power restored by Thursday.
- MLGW removes trees that fall on power lines, the City of Memphis deals with those that fall on streets. McGowen says residents should call 311 to have city crews remove trees affecting public access.
- Recent efforts to speed up tree trimming around power lines reduced the impact of this storm. McGowen said that while this was the seventh-worst power outage in MLGW history, it might have affected more than 200,000 customers had the utility not expedited its tree-trimming cycle.
- Power reliability, he says, is at eight-year all-time high, and the outage minutes are at eight-year all-time low.
- To harden the power grid against future storms, the utility is in a process of undergrounding power lines and installing more resilient poles and power fixtures.
WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (Host): Two days after a powerful summer storm hit the Mid-South, many homes are still without electricity. Joining us for an update on the recovery is Memphis Light, Gas and Water President and CEO Doug McGowen. Thanks for talking with us.
DOUG MCGOWEN, Absolutely, Chris. Glad to be here.
BLANK: So, looking here at the MLGW outage map on Monday afternoon shows about 8 percent of customers still without power. It's down from about 25 percent. Still a lot: about 30,000 homes and businesses. How is progress so far?
MCGOWEN: So, we were impacted pretty heavily on Saturday evening. 140,000 customers total impacted. We knew that we were going to need some assistance, so we immediately asked for that assistance on Saturday night, and we had outside help come on Sunday morning, and they arrived at 6:00 in the morning. The progress has exceeded expectations and the typical pace you might see for restoration. Our team is practiced at this, and they are stood up and doing a good job. We have, as you said, restored power to more than 100,000 customers. I do want to say, though, that progress will not quite stay at that pace because as we restore outages that affect thousands of customers, we'll now be assigning crews to smaller outages that are impacting only hundreds or tens of customers. And so, same number of crews, a little less impact as they as they work on those outages. So, we want to continue to make big progress. One of the things we're focusing on is trying to get the kids back in school tomorrow. We know we had some of them out. And so, we have mapped those schools with the outages that we have to try to get as many on as we possibly can to get those kids back to school tomorrow and many of the major employment centers back in power so that people can get back to work.
BLANK: Is Thursday still the target for, I guess, a full restoration?
MCGOWEN: I say we will have the vast majority of our customers restored by Thursday night. Only from experience, and because we know the number of damages and outages that we have.
BLANK: You know, whenever this happens, folks do spend a lot of time staring at that outage map. But what do the numbers actually tell us? For example, I zoom into the southeast part of Memphis near Riverdale and Shelby Drive. It's a pretty hard-hit area. One section of a neighborhood has a thousand outages, but then a few streets over, there's, like, a handful of outages. What's the likeliest reason for that? And, I guess, more importantly, which gets fixed first?
MCGOWEN: Sure. The likeliest reason is the circuit and the way that it was impacted. So, a circuit will carry between 1,000 and 2,000 customers on one side of the neighborhood, depending on the orientation of the circuit. It may not have been affected by wind. The other neighborhood may have had power lines and poles that were directly perpendicular and took the full brunt of the wind, and those poles and lines came down, trees came down, impacting that entire circuit. So, we prioritize the outages that have the largest number of customers so that we can get the biggest bang for our buck and get the most customers back on as quickly as we possibly can.
BLANK: I have a colleague who lives on a cove, and a huge tree fell across that street blocking the residents in. About those trees: are the trees a city issue or an MLGW issue? How does that get coordinated?
MCGOWEN: Yes, it absolutely is coordinated. If it's on a power line, MLGW takes care of it. If it is not involving power -- it just fell across the street -- the City of Memphis will take care of that. So, you can call 311, and the city will come out and make sure they take care of it. I know that they're heavy into debris removal right now so that customers can get out.
BLANK: When you got this job, one of your priorities was dealing with the major backlog of tree trimming. And it seemed like that was really about ice storms, to keep heavy branches from falling on lines. What's the current tree trimming situation, and is that relevant to wind storms?
MCGOWEN: It absolutely is, Chris. It's a great question because I will tell you that if we had not invested in tree trimming, we would have had more than 200,000 customers out. That is my assessment. Because of that, our reliability is at eight-year all-time high, and the outage minutes are at eight-year all-time low. Now, when you have a storm like this that takes down entire trees, because we're only pruning the trees back within 15 feet of the power lines, you know, those whole trees coming down. And when poles and wires come down, there's nothing you can do about that. We aim to be on a three-year cycle. We achieved our three-year cycle in two years and three months. We will stay on that three-year cycle from this point forward. That helped us significantly in the storm. It doesn't feel like it if you're the one that's out of power. But this is all about the wind impacting the wires and the poles and whole trees coming down.
BLANK: You mentioned on Sunday that there are ongoing efforts to harden the power grid for events like this in the future. What's, maybe, a couple of things that that entails, and when will we start seeing fewer big outages like this?
MCGOWEN: Sure. Well, I would say we are already starting to see fewer big outages. As the seventh largest storm in our history, these are relatively rare. But as to hardening, we will do selective undergrounding as a part of our grid modernization. We are about two times ahead of where we wanted to be with pole replacement, so we have far exceeded that. And that's upsizing the poles. We're also trussing the poles for a little bit of extra stability. So, there's an array of things that we are doing, from automated response to actually upgrading infrastructure that's in the ground. You know, there are classes of poles based on their diameter, and a larger diameter pole can carry more weight. And so, we are opting for the larger diameter poles just for extra hedge of resilience.
