By Stephen Smoot
Thomas Butcher, regional external affairs consultant for First Energy Corp, the company that operates Mon Power, came to the region to speak with emergency planning officials and make a key donation.
Butcher met with officials in the morning, then joined the Local Emergency Planning Committee at their lunch meeting last Thursday. He was asked impromptu if he wished to speak to the committee to kick off the meeting.
Though speaking about an incident far from Pendleton County, Butcher took the opportunity to explain the process and strategy behind major outage responses so that emergency officials could better understand and communicate with Mon Power.
“We just came off of a huge power outage,” Butcher shared. He went on to say that a bank of strong, fast, and hard winds developed over Lake Erie and tore through northern Ohio and into Pennsylvania. Eighty mile an hour winds helped to spawn three tornadoes. One of these extended only 350 yards, but whipped the landscape with 117 mile per hour winds and traveled for 17 miles.
He added that the company had to respond to the outage there, which affected more than 600,000 customers, while also maintaining deployed reserves to tackle the approach of the remnants of Hurricane Debby as it approached West Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey.
“How do you manage that?” he asked rhetorically.
“Long story short, we were able to mobilize 6,000 employees,” Butcher answered. With the benefit of mutual aid agreements between First Energy and public and private utilities across the Midwest, the team came together.
In six days, they strung 200,000 miles of new wire, set up 400 poles, and restored service to 98 percent of those affected.
For major events, First Energy has predetermined staging areas in most places. Near Franklin, they have one such area that can handle 1,000 people. Also, they have tanker trucks that take fuel to where the trucks and other equipment work to prevent delays in refueling.
“It’s an amazing operation” that takes 24 hours to mobilize, Butcher described.
Rick Gillespie, Pendleton County Emergency Services coordinator, echoed, “That’s pretty impressive.”
Earlier in the day, Butcher had presented the county with a donation that will tremendously enhance the capabilities of every Pendleton County volunteer fire department. Mon Power donated portable landing zone lights for medical helicopters. This can help to provide much more flexibility in getting fast transport to those who need it.
“We want to publicly thank Mon Power,” stated Gillespie, who went on to say that they are “a private company, but are pretty much quasi-first responders.”
Butcher then addressed questions by Diana Mitchell from Pendleton 911 about the initial estimated time of arrival that Mon Power generally answers requests with. Usually, the system says one to two hours, but the real time is not knowable at first without “boots on the ground.” Butcher advised to “call back and get a little better ETA, maybe 15 or 20 minutes later.”
He also admitted, “It is frustrating.”
Gillespie said that “we know it’s a canned answer,” referring to the initial estimated time.
Butcher also asked that when fire responders or others need power cut off for a fire or other emergency, to give the most specific information possible, down to address, pole number, or latitude and longitude.
