The Message
Communication, communication, communication — whether direct to the public or to the towns, it's obviously crucial. The main improvement this year was a two-tiered system in which 15 community outreach people, several of them with political experience, came on board full-time. Once the storm hit, each town had a liaison who became their lifeline to the company.
By most accounts, the liaison system worked as planned. Long before the storm, each town gave the company a list of 10 priority sites to restore first, and that was a blueprint for action.
The trouble is that the liaisons were not magicians. They could smooth out some issues, but they couldn't make crews suddenly appear and they couldn't solve technical issues because they were not systems engineers.
By Day 2, the cities and towns with major outages — Ridgefield, Old Saybrook and Stonington, among others — were frustrated with the liaison system, because they were not seeing the crews they were promised. Some complained that the liaisons had no power to make things happen, and no experience in the field.
"You could get anyone," an Old Saybrook official said. "It could be the lady in payroll."
Well, that was the point — rank-and-file office employees getting out to the towns to make sure local concerns were not lost in the chaos. In Westbrook, First Selectman Willie Fritz was displeased with the company's recovery efforts. He let it be known to his liaison in no uncertain terms, and by the next day, he had crews in town — leading him to praise the system.
In the many press briefings that were widely aired, Quinlan gave more or less the same message that his old boss, Jeffrey Butler, gave last year: We're working hard, here's where we stand. Last year, there was obvious tension between Butler, who was president of CL&P and resigned his post after the storm, and the governor. This time around, Quinlan and his staff worked more closely with Malloy and his staff on advance preparations, and, Occhiogrosso said, were more willing to take suggestions during the recovery.
In the category of small details that add up, West Hartford Mayor Scott Slifka said on Day 3 that the town was "flooded with emails and calls all day with frustrations rising because of that phone system." The problem: Residents were calling customer service and getting, in some cases, a clipped, recorded comment that the company didn't have any answers.
Slifka suggested a more detailed recording repeating the message Quinlan gave at the briefings. Gross, in response, said the company's banks of customer service people did, in fact, talk through customers' concerns in great detail.
The Art of Lowering Expectations
If CL&P learned one lesson last year, it was to resist making promises the company couldn't keep. This year's strategy was simple: Don't make promises at all, at least for a while.
It was Day 4 before the company gave any kind of timetable for power restoration, and even then it was broad, with room for error. The goal was to restore all but 24,000 customers, 2 percent of the entire base, by Day 9.
The number of customer outages fell to 182,000 on Day 4, leaving CL&P five more days to restore less than half the number of customers who were out at the peak. And 500 more linemen were on the way to Connecticut.
Customers and town officials wanted more detail, and on Day 5, they relaunched the interactive, town-by-town online estimator — which is built for small, localized events. Most towns with significant outages still showed no recovery dates. Other towns showed recovery by the end of Day 7, Sunday night, when in fact they were restored by Friday night, two days ahead.
By Day 9, Election Day, CL&P was down to fewer than 5,000 outages, easily meeting its target. By contrast, Day 9 of last year's recovery brought apologies from Butler for missing the target of 99 percent restoration — along with threats of lawsuits and angry calls for state reviews and federal investigations.
So, the company's performance was dramatically better this year, right? Not if you look at CL&P's average daily reduction in the number of people without power over the first six days after each storm. This year: 68,000. Last year: 83,000.
There are other measures, of course. This year's restoration showed results sooner — the number of customers out fell by 318,000 this year after three full days of cleanup, compared with 240,000 last year. And this year the roads were cleared much faster, with 90 percent of blocked streets reopened by the middle of Day 5.
The Year of Trees
Everyone agreed after last year's storms that CL&P had not kept up with the task of tree trimming. For all of 2011, the company spent $27 million cutting limbs, branches and whole trees that threatened transmission and distribution lines. This year, the total was $50 million.
