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MISSOURI DIVISION |
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE SEPTEMBER 2000 POST EARTHQUAKE HIGHWAY RESPONSE AND RECOVERY SEMINAR HELD IN ST. LOUIS MISSOURI
UTILITY RESPONSE BY DAVID WAKEMAN
MR. MUSSER: We have one more presentation on utility response. Dave Wakeman is the supervising engineer for the Reliability Services Department of the Ameren Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, which he joined in 1982. He has a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Washington University. His current job responsibilities include organizational support and manning of Ameren's emergency operation center.
MR. WAKEMAN: Thanks and good afternoon. Basically my job involves getting the lights back on or keeping them on. That's what we do quite often.
We don't have any earthquake experience at Ameren. That's a good thing. From what I've heard today, potentially we will have some in the not too distant future. We have a service territory that covers southern Missouri, southern Illinois, St. Louis and much of mid Missouri. So chances are, if the New Madrid fault is an issue, it's going to involve Ameren so we're going to have to be on track to respond to that situation.
Basically I want to talk a little bit about Ameren's emergency response experience and then what we plan to do in the event of a major disaster such as an earthquake.
Thunderstorms are by far the most common emergency operation that an electrical utility is involved in. Thunderstorms come pretty quickly in the Midwest, do lots of damage and move on and leave many people without power. It can average anywhere from five to 20 times a year we'll be involved in opening our emergency operation center and dealing with large scale power outages.
Typically we consider a major storm and open our emergency operation center if it's 25,000 customers out of service. We had a storm about three weeks ago that involved 225,000 customers. That is a pretty large-scale effort to restore power.
One difference with this kind of situation is that electric utilities deal with it with very limited, local governmental or agency interaction. The limited interaction we do have are typically fire and police that respond to wires down and stay there until we can make that safe for the public. We operate in an emergency fashion to try to restore full power. So we do this quite a bit but it's a little different than it will be if we have a major widespread disaster.
Our emergency operation center is involved with macro-management of the recovery effort. So we allocate resources; we get people to the scene; we get supplies to the hotel; and act as an information clearinghouse for our entire corporation and the media. That's basically our responsibility. We do not micro-manage the restoration effort. We get people to the area and let the local people respond to those.
We had a significant flood in 1993, the summer of 1993, and there are some similarities as to an earthquake in that it was a very long-term event. These weren't flash floods. We knew they were coming ant that there would be potential levee breaks. We knew some of our facilities were going to be under water.
Flooding is very different from an earthquake, in that, an earthquake is going to happen very quickly. But the flood went on for several months. I think the earthquake recovery effort for utilities is going to be very prolonged. So in that mode, there are some similarities.
We staffed our emergency operation center for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for about three months during that period. We had somebody there all the time to interact with local agencies and governments. The interaction varied. Sometimes there were a lot of road closures. There were police and National Guard closing roads and securing areas. We had to get in and out of those areas in order to perform our duties. So there is a lot of interaction between those government agencies when we get our people to the scene, to get them past the roadblocks and get clearance to get in there and to get back out safely. We have to insure the safety of emergency responders. Obviously, most of the people when they arrive at the scene aren't knowledgeable of high voltage electrical facilities; they don't know what's safe, they don't know what's energized. We have to be in there in order to make those areas safe for those people to respond.
That goes the same for the public. We're in there; we have to understand what has to be out, what is safe for the public as well.
We have the coordination of large and small-scale outages. We learned a lot from the floods of 1993. That's where our emergency operation center came into existence. That's where we understood the relationship that you have to have with local government and local agencies in order to really be effective in handling these situations.
There is a levee that broke in the Chesterfield area. That's a pretty large area that has a lot of businesses in it. We knew it potentially was going to break. We have one substation in that area that would basically put that whole area out of power. We had people in there when the levee broke as the water started to come up in order to keep the lights on as long we could. They were trying to recover their businesses. There's some housing in that area, but it's mostly businesses. Those were mostly people trying to salvage what they can, so we wanted to keep the lights on as long as we could and also to get safe egress from that area. So we literally had a guy standing by to keep the power on until the last second, give everybody as much time as possible, and at that point we told him to shut it off and the whole valley went dark. The utility guy was there.
There were other areas that we were involved in. The River Des Peres had a propane tank farm and that got flooded. Apparently the tanks got off their foundations and there were concerns that an high explosion could occur. The city government made decisions on how to make that safe for the citizens. They came to us with an area map that was squared off and asked us to shutoff the power to this section of the City. That works real nice from the city planning perspective, but electric utilities don't build anything that square. It took a lot of work to actually isolate the part they wanted outage. Again, we have a lot of good experience working with local governments. I think that's really going to pay off in the long run to respond better.
We're active in some of the local organizations formed in the 1993 era. The disaster recovery council is made up of representatives from local police, utilities, some businesses, and emergency management agencies from the county, city and state. They get together periodically to discuss the issues, maintain contacts, share ideas and plans. They want to be prepared and have those relationships established if something does happen. It would be tough to get these things going right when a disaster happens. We would waste time just getting everyone together and deciding what to do.
We're also involved in a Mid-America Planning Forum that is a group of businesses that get together. These are real contingency planning people and business contingency planning. Since every business needs electricity, we want to be there to help understand their plans and let them know what we can do and can't do. So everyone gets prepared.
Also we've done some training in emergency management, principles of emergency management, and interstate emergency management in both states. We try to get what we can out of this. We pick and choose from the ideas that will apply to the electric utility business. If we can understand what emergency planners are doing, we can do a better and coordinated job. I think it will be very beneficial in helping us interact with the local governments.
What about preparedness? We have a major disaster recovery plan in place. The plan has ideas about where to respond, who should respond, and our responsibilities in the event of a major disaster to our system. There are going to be a lot of issues on getting our people to the right places at the right time. We have a lot of employees and they all have unique skills so we have to get them to the right place. This is going to be a challenge in a widespread disaster. We have employees equipped and trained to report to the county and city emergency operation centers. Again, the majority of our customer base is in the St. Louis area. Those people are trained and equipped with laptops, cell phones and company radios. We hope some of those things will work when the time comes. They're going to be there and be able to interface with the city officials to get the requests for services and information to us. They can help give a good first line of defense because they know what an electric utility does in the county and city emergency operation centers.
We began doing mitigation efforts in the early 1990s. All that initiative came about and raised the issue. I don't think we would have been as prepared as we are now. If you think you are prepared now, just wait and see if you really are.
Some of our mitigation efforts included bolting our transformers down. Those substation transformers aren't typically bolted down. They weigh a tremendous amount, 20,000 pounds or more so why would you bolt it down, it can't move. It can't go anywhere. We went back and we learned a lot from the California earthquake. We sent representatives out there to understand the task force on utility systems.
Our substations are battery operated for protection. We had to put seismographs in there. We have a battery per substation usage; transformers all bolted. Those take a year and a half to buy so you're going to have to be prepared for that.
Our computer systems, the other things that all businesses have to do, we have worked on those to try to be as ready as we can to work disasters.
We also realize we're dependent on the city, county and state infrastructures, bridges, roads, police, fire, all those will be critical to our ability to restore power. We understand that. We don't know what it's going to hold for us, if it's effective, what kind of assessment they will be able to do, what kind of information they will be able to provide. That will really be the key at the beginning.
We're also dependent on other utilities, water and gas. We have a lot of gas facilities as well. We have our own radio system; is that going to be standing? Are telephones going to be working, are cell phones going to be working. How many people only have cordless phones in their house? It's a common thing. The phone plugs into the wall; you don't have power, the telephone system is there; you still can't call out. There is a lot of issues there you have to deal with. PBX systems, typically unless you have power, the phones aren't going to be too effective. So the infrastructure is really important.
I heard somebody talk about Mutual assistance agreements. We have one through the EEI, Edison Electric Institute. We have a set up agreement with probably about 75 utilities. I didn't count them but we can call them for assistance. We called Kansas City Power and Light and got them to send us some 20 crews to help restore power. We just didn't have enough people. It took us three days to get the last set of people on. Which is really excellent, with 225,000 customers being out of service. But still, you can hire a few contractors, but that high voltage work is pretty specific and fairly dangerous. You just can't let anyone do it. Utilities are typically the only people that have the equipment and the manpower to be able to do that. So that's going to be very beneficial. We'll be able to call upon bordering states, functioning states, and anybody else that wasn't affected to use their people to help us restore power.
We have mobile data in most of our trucks. We have computers in all the trucks that respond to trouble, so if we are having trouble with our radio system and cellular system and CDPD is still available, we will be able to do the data in our trucks, CDPD, which again is cellular, data over cellular is down, we'll be able to do it over the radio. Both down, it's going to be a little more difficult.
We have critical information available at alternate dispatch centers. Our main dispatch center is in St. Louis right downtown here a few blocks away. If that's damaged, we have a center in Matoon, Illinois, that does Illinois dispatching, which we could use for our whole system. We have another center in Jefferson City. So hopefully one of those centers, if our main dispatch office is damaged, one of those will be able to respond to that and move that functionality to another location.
So that's kind of some of the things we have done to prepare. Basically in response to a major disaster like this, we'll have to secure our facilities. That will be one of our first duties to insure the public safety and safety of responders by securing our facilities, figuring out what was damaged, what we need to do to make those as safe as possible.
If anybody saw the fire at the Venice plant on the news, a couple four weeks ago, I guess that was, that is an example of trying to secure a facility and it's a pretty major disaster in that power plant and it has to be made safe for people.
Another thing is assessing damage. We'll have to try to assess the damage we're going to have, and assess the resources that will be available and then our next step will be plan a coordinated response. We have all those plans in place. It will be tested when it happens. We continue to try to learn from seminars like this and the people in California and other places that have detailed electrical systems and the damage that can occur. There's only so much we can do, but certainly we're going to be on the case as quick as possible to try to respond.
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