THE BULLETIN • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2021 A11
WINTER STORMS
Hospitals
confront
water
shortages
Associated Press
Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB
A large tree limb is tangled in a power line, lying across SE Ash Street near 20th Avenue in Portland on Tuesday. The area spent the week digging out after huge snow and ice storms.
Outages
Continued from A1
In short, when electricity, the life-
blood of modern living, goes out, chaos
and sometimes tragedy follow.
The power outages experienced in
the Willamette Valley over the past
week are nothing like those experi-
enced in Texas, where surging demand,
power plant outages and lack of access
to backup electricity supplies forced
grid operators into rolling and extended
blackouts that affected millions of cus-
tomers across the state.
Closer to home, the problem was
three waves of weather that began Feb.
11 in the lower Willamette Valley and
got worse with successive waves of ic-
ing that moved north over the week-
end. More than a week later, the outage
numbers had declined from a high of
about 340,000 around Oregon to some
38,000 midday Sunday.
Why the outages?
Oregon’s outages have little to do with
surging demand or available electricity,
but repeated failures of transmission and
distribution lines that aren’t designed to
carry such heavy loads of ice, and prob-
lems with falling trees and branches that
went well beyond the scope of state rules
requiring utilities to keep vegetation
around their infrastructure clear.
It’s hard to overestimate the impact
of that kind of weather, which left large
swaths of PGE’s, and to a lesser extent
PacifiCorp’s, service territories looking
like a war zone. Their restoration ef-
forts, in many ways, have been a minor
miracle, even as tens of thousands have
been left in the cold. PGE’s customers
were particularly hard hit because of
where the storm hit and the fact that it
has a larger, denser customer base and
transmission system.
Yet Oregon regulators have identified
repeated failures by the state’s two larg-
est electric utilities in keeping up with
tree trimming, preventing vegetation
from contacting conductors and main-
taining required clearances. Last year,
regulators told both utilities that their
vegetation management programs were
deficient, and that may have exacer-
bated recent problems.
Inevitably, the latest storm will
prompt public and private conversa-
tions about what can be done to prevent
the situation from recurring.
Utility officials say it is possible to
harden the grid against such outages
and increase their system’s resiliency
through stepped up tree and vegetation
trimming, advanced grid technology
and other infrastructure improvements.
Utilities are already moving on those
fronts, but there are limitations and
tradeoffs, and the solutions often come
with a steep price tag.
“We will learn from this event,” said
Larry Bekkedahl, vice president of
grid architecture at PGE, which saw a
peak of more than 300,000 customers
affected by blackouts. Given enough
money, he said, engineers can design a
solution to almost anything. The ques-
tion is the cost versus benefit.
“Is this going to be a 40- or 50-year
storm? Or maybe this is happening
more often,” he said.
“Ultimately it is the customer who is
either impacted or is paying for it, and
we want to make sure we’re doing the
right things.”
Vegetation management
Utilities’ vegetation management
programs are clearly a piece of the prob-
lem — and the solution.
One of the programs’ primary aims
is to reduce wildfire risks, particularly
in rural areas. But the strategy has ob-
vious implications during wind and ice
storms, too: If trees and branches are
farther from lines and poles, they’re less
likely to take them down when they fall.
Safety staff at the Public Utility Com-
mission conduct annual field inspec-
tions to sample the utilities’ tree trim-
ming programs, identify vegetation
touching overhead lines, and ensure
utilities are maintaining the state’s man-
dated line clearances.
Last year’s audits noted serious prob-
Thousands in the dark in Oregon
Some 38,000 Portland General Electric customers were still without power Sunday.
The vast majority were in Clackamas County, which had nearly 14,000 households
and businesses still out, and Marion County, with nearly 13,000. The utility said it had
restored power to 14,000 customers Saturday, and that some 400 utility crews were
in the field Sunday. PGE had called in crews from surrounding states to assist after an
unusually fierce snow and ice storm last weekend knocked out power to more than
700,000 customers at various points.
Pacific Power, with a much smaller service area, said it had restored power to all but
a relative handful of customers, most in the Salem area.
— The Oregonian
lems and violations for both companies.
The PUC issued a “warning” no-
tice to PGE that based on its review of
its system, its vegetation maintenance
“appears to have deficiencies that are
potentially systemwide.” In a review of
“various” urban and rural areas, reg-
ulators found “719 locations where
evidence existed of contact between
vegetation and primary electrical con-
ductors.” Based on historical reviews,
they said the number of tree and en-
ergized conductor contacts were ap-
proaching all-time highs.
PGE says it typically trims trees on
a three-year cycle, and has doubled its
spending since 2017 to $26 million in
2020. The utility sees even higher spend-
ing moving forward — as high as $40
million with new construction and emer-
gency trimming. It says it is actively using
the audit results to improve its program.
PGE’s system is larger than Pacifi-
Corp’s, with more miles of overhead
lines. But regulators also found prob-
lems with PacifiCorp’s vegetation pro-
gram, issuing a lower level “caution”
notice to that utility indicating that its
program “needs improvement to en-
sure safety compliance.” While Pacific
Power’s 353 violations showed a de-
crease from the 472 found in the 2019
review, the PUC said the number of
contacts was still too high considering
the high-profile wildfire mitigation ef-
forts and identified tree hazards in the
region.
About a decade ago, Pacific Power
transitioned from a three-year trim-
ming cycle to a four-year, with interim
trimming of hot spots. That corre-
sponded with a significant increase in
violations identified by the annual au-
dits. Utility commission staff said they
were concerned the four-year cycle is
not adequately meeting administrative
rules on keeping trees safely distanced
from power lines and equipment.
Last year, PacifiCorp, Pacific Power’s
parent company, unsuccessfully sought
its first rate increase since 2013. One
of the company’s rationales for that in-
crease was to help cover expanded veg-
etation management and other wildfire
prevention work.
A filing in the case shows PUC staff
was skeptical because PacifiCorp had
no projection for when its vegetation
management would be under control.
Instead, regulators proposed making
some of those cost recoveries depen-
dent on the utility bringing its violations
under established levels, and suggested
a reasonable number of violations in a
given year would be fewer than 75.
Kandi Young, a PUC spokeswoman,
said utilities don’t need approval to ad-
just their trim cycle. The utility is re-
sponsible to execute what’s needed to
provide safe and reliable service — in-
cluding meeting or exceeding the min-
imum requirements for line clearances.
Utilities submit a breakdown of expen-
ditures in their rate cases, and regulators
scrutinize them. But the PUC approves
overall rates, not specific line items.
Both utilities say they are seeing
faster tree growth in some areas due to
rising temperatures and longer growing
seasons. Prolonged droughts and bug
infestation in other zones are under-
mining the health of trees in or border-
ing their rights of way.
One obvious solution is to trim trees
more aggressively so they maintain
clearances by the end of the trim cycle.
But that’s a sore spot with customers,
who often complain that utilities’ con-
tractors are butchering their trees.
Some Portlanders also lay blame
with the city, which requires residents
to maintain street trees that often grow
up into power lines and cause problems
during storms like last week’s.
Dennis Phillips, a Hollywood resi-
dent, said he was looking to plant street
trees that would grow to 20 feet at ma-
turity. But to satisfy the city require-
ments, he ultimately settled on a Kat-
sura that grows 40 to 60 feet tall.
“Tree policy is crazy,” he wrote in
an email. “The city argues larger trees
produce more foliage and shade which
leads to reduced AC loads and CO2
emissions. We wanted smaller trees to
maintain our view of the early morning
sky, reduce moss buildup on our roof,
reduce risk of limbs falling on power
and cable lines, minimize leaf removal
and pruning costs, and avoid costly side-
walk and sewer repairs. Does the city’s
tree policy make economic sense?”
Utilities say they have an ongoing
conversation with the city about its ur-
ban forestry program to make sure res-
idents are planting “the right tree in the
right place.” But they acknowledge that
the tree programs in many communi-
ties complicate their job.
“They do have a significant role in it,”
said PGE’s Bekkedahl. “Each commu-
nity is slightly different, and we need to
work together to find the right solutions
there…We do need to improve.”
Meanwhile, utilities are turning to 3D
laser scanning and other imaging tech-
nology that can help map tree density,
species, clearances and even tree health,
to make better, more timely decisions
about what needs to be cut back over a
broad area.
“We love our trees in the Pacific
Northwest and there’s a lot of them,”
said Allen Berreth, vice president of op-
erations at PacifiCorp. “We’re always
evaluating the performance of the pro-
gram to see if it needs to change and we
can get better results. There is no one
solution that’s solves all these problems.”
Strengthening infrastructure
One common question after wildfires
or ice storms is why utilities don’t sim-
ply run their lines underground.
In fact, it’s standard practice in new
subdivisions or new buildings, and is
often used in rural corridors with reli-
ability issues, more unpaved rights of
way, and high wildfire risks. The gen-
eral limitation is cost, particularly in es-
tablished urban neighborhoods where
it involves digging a trench up streets
and to each individual home. It also in-
volves changing out customer-owned
equipment — a significant and unwel-
come cost for ratepayers, Berreth said.
California’s biggest electric utility,
Pacific Gas & Electric, has estimated
that it costs an average of $3 million
per mile to convert overhead distribu-
tion lines to underground, compared to
$800,000 a mile to build new overhead
lines. Some industry studies put the dis-
parity even higher.
PGE’s Bekkedahl says burying lines is
appropriate in many situations, but they
are not immune to outages either. Data
in the company’s 2019 annual reliability
report shows equipment failures were
responsible for about 15% of customer
outage hours overall. In those cases, the
largest contributor, responsible for almost
40% of the underlying outage hours, is
problems with underground conductors.
“Underground cable is one of our big-
gest headaches in terms of failure rates,”
he said. “When people say just ‘under-
ground everything,’ (they don’t recog-
nize) it fails more than other equip-
ment and it takes you longer to repair it.
There’s some pain associated with that.”
The same data showed that failed
poles and other structures were re-
sponsible for less than 1% of the outage
hours due to equipment failure in 2019.
That number may not change much
this year, as the company will attribute
most of its recent pole failures to ad-
verse weather. But Bekkedahl says the
company will have to replace 1,500 to
1,600 poles from this storm.
“This is our version of a hurricane,”
he said.
In some parts of its service territory,
entire corridors of poles were dragged
to the ground. A single pole, in some
cases, can carry multiple transformers
and both transmission and distribution
lines. Repairing them involves clearing
up downed lines, trees and limbs, get-
ting rid of the old pole and setting a new
one, putting on cross arms and installing
the new electrical equipment. It’s a big
project, one that can be compounded by
environmental issues if a blown trans-
former leaked oil, for instance.
The solution, in some cases, will be
installing steel poles, which are stronger
and don’t rot.
The biggest problem in last week’s
storm was downed transmission lines
and neighborhood power lines. Utilities
follow regional specifications for what
level of icing lines are designed to with-
stand.
In the valley, Behkkedahl said, that’s a
quarter-inch of ice, and in the foothills
a half-inch. During this storm, utilities
saw lines encased in 2 inches of ice in
some areas. Meanwhile, branches that
might normally sway as much as 5 feet
— and still maintain desired clearances
— sagged over power lines or simply
collapsed on them, with predictable re-
sults. Tall trees from outside the areas
they are required to clear were coming
down on lines, too.
Strengthening the system, in this case,
might involve using covered conductors
that can handle more load and vegeta-
tion contact without shorting. Utilities
can also replace brackets that connect
lines to poles with models designed to
break away at a specific point, without
dragging down the pole or the cross arm.
When a line goes down, the power
goes out. But technology can help there
too.
Utilities have installed smart meters
over the last several years that give them
faster, more granular information about
which customers are out. More advanced
“recloser” and relay technology can also
help utilities locate faults faster and deter-
mine which electrical switches to close to
isolate the outage and which to open to
reroute service to affected customers.
PacifiCorp is piloting that technol-
ogy in several areas, though PUC staff
remains skeptical of many of the related
capital projects the company proposed
in its recent rate case.
One more esoteric solution to the
outage problems is a micro-grid, a de-
fined geographic footprint with its own
source of generation (solar, wind and
generators) and battery backup. PGE
has simulated a micro-grid in Salem
with a 1.25-megawatt lithium battery
array and access to power from gener-
ators owned by third parties to main-
tain greater reliability. As a concept, it
works, and can be deployed in emer-
gency facilities. But it’s impractical in a
multi-day outage spread over a broad
area or even a neighborhood.
“You can see a future where we’d have
large batteries in a specific area, but
they’re only a four- to eight-hour solu-
tion,” Bekkedahl said. “If you’re going
days you need localized (power) gener-
ation that supports that as well.”
Utility experts said the extent and du-
ration of this outage will eventually be
hashed out in both public and private
forums. Some of the solutions will be
implemented, especially where they ad-
dress overlapping risks.
“The question is how much effort and
investment do you make for a one in 50-
year event,” said Bob Jenks, executive di-
rector of the ratepayer advocacy group,
the Citizens Utility Board of Oregon.
But with climate change driving
more intense storms and wildfires, he
asked, “what dollars do you throw at it,
recognizing that these events are going
to cost a lot of money themselves.”
HOUSTON — Hospitals
across the South grappled
with water shortages Sun-
day as the region carried on
with recovery efforts in the
wake of a devastating win-
ter storm, and the weather
offered a balmy respite —
temperatures as high as the
mid-60s.
At the height of the storm,
hospitals were left scram-
bling to care for patients
amid record cold, snow and
ice that battered parts of the
country more accustomed
to going through winter
with light jackets and short
sleeves. The icy blast rup-
tured water mains, knocked
out power to millions of
utility customers and con-
tributed to at least 76 deaths
— half of which occurred in
Texas. At least seven people
died in Tennessee and four
in Oregon.
A rural hospital in Ana-
huac, Texas, about 50 miles
east of Houston, lost both
water and power.
William Kiefer, CEO of
Chambers Health, which
runs the hospital along with
two clinics and a wellness
center, said the facilities re-
sorted to backup generators
and water from a 275-gallon
storage tank. They refilled
it three times using water
from a swimming pool in
the wellness center.
Last Monday, when tem-
peratures were in the teens,
a woman about to give birth
walked into the hospital af-
ter she could not make it
through the ice and snow
to her hospital in suburban
Houston. Emergency room
staff delivered the baby
safely, Kiefer said.
“It would have taken her
another two hours to get
to (the suburban Hous-
ton hospital) if our facility
wasn’t there,” he said. “We
can probably assume she
would have had the baby in
her car and the snow. Not a
good situation.”
Water was restored
Thursday, and operations
had returned to normal
Sunday, he said.
Still, hundreds of cars
lined up at NRG Stadium to
receive food and water from
the Houston Food Bank.
The bank also delivered
supplies to vulnerable citi-
zens, including seniors and
the disabled.
Memphis, Tennessee,
saw 10 inches of snow last
week. Memphis, Light, Gas
& Water issued a boil-wa-
ter advisory on Thursday
out of concern that low
water pressure caused by
problems at aging pump-
ing stations and water main
ruptures could lead to con-
tamination. The advisory
was still in place Sunday;
utility officials said they did
not know when they might
lift it.
About 260,000 homes
and businesses were under
the advisory. Hospitals and
nursing homes have been
forced to switch to bottled
water. The Tennessee Na-
tional Guard was supplying
St. Francis Hospital with
water.
Meanwhile, the White
House said about a third
of the COVID-19 vaccine
doses delayed by the storm
were delivered over the
weekend. The weather cre-
ated a backlog of about 6
million doses as power out-
ages closed some vaccina-
tion centers and icy weather
stranded vaccine in ship-
ping hubs. White House
press secretary Jen Psaki
told ABC’s “This Week”
that about 2 million of those
doses have gone out.
Nearly 230,000 custom-
ers across the South were
still without power as of
Sunday, according to Pow-
erOutage.us, a website that
tracks power outages.