A virtual Joint Hearing of the New York State Senate and Assembly on Thursday, August 20 addressed “Power and Communication Failures from Tropical Storm Isaias,” which hit the region on August 4, downing several thousand trees and utility wires. The purpose of the hearing was to hold a Q & A session for officials with leaders of the State Public Service Commission, and receive testimony on the electricity outages and communication failures during and after the storm. Nearly eight years after the company supplanted LIPA in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Public Service Electric & Gas – Long Island, a subsidiary of PSE&G utility conglomerate headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, came under fire from Long Island elected officials.
New York State Sen. James Gaughran, who represents North Shore communities from Glen Cove to Northport, told the Public Service Commission leadership last Thursday part of the problem may be that the powers of the State Public Service Commission is not the same as the Commission has over supplier Con Edison in New York City and other utilities in the state.
“My district got hit pretty hard and we have a survey with information from about 1,600 constituents. The vast majority of them noted that their power was out for four days or more and we know about a 93-year-old that had to be rushed to the hospital because she is on the Critical Care list, she needed oxygen. PSEG Long Island did not respond at all, one of the many issues…You literally look at the LIPA Act which specifically states that jurisdiction of the Public Service Commission does not exist except for small and minute areas. You advise LIPA and you strongly recommend, but I don’t believe the Public Service Commission has the authority to fine them as you do with Con Ed. Part of my frustration when I listen to my State Senate colleagues from the five boroughs talking about trying to have the Public Service Commission go after Con Edison, I am jealous because your Commission does not have the authority to do that for Long Island,” Sen Gaughran said.
As stated on the Public Service Commission website, the Long Island Office of the New York State Department of Public Service oversees the Department’s operations on Long Island. This office is charged with examining the core utility operations of PSEG Long Island and advising the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) with its role in overseeing activities of PSEG Long Island.
“The LIPA format was intentional to ensure that this publicly-owned asset — the Long Island grid — continued to be eligible for FEMA assistance and low-interest financing and the like. That decision was intentionally made. That is why the Department of Public Service’s powers were expanded to include that oversight of the private service provider. The contract that LIPA operates with PSEG has clear provisions, including termination of the contract for poor performance. That is something that with evidence that we can gather through our investigation, it could be pursued if it was necessary to do so,” explained Thomas Congdon, Executive Deputy of the NYS Public Service Commission. Sen. Gaughran explained that the only way that can happen is through the pursuit of LIPA against PSEG-LI, not by an action of the State Public Service Commission. He also points out how the Department of Public Service can’t enforce changes or impose fines to PSEG Long Island.
State Senator Todd Kaminsky, who represents the South Shore and chairs the New York State Senate’s Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation asked if the Public Service Commission has sufficient oversight authority over PSEG despite the LIPA arrangement.
“My constituents want to know why they were told things would change after Sandy, but that things didn’t; why do they pay some of the highest electric and internet bills in the country, but we could not even reach a service provider for days on end to report an outage? Even for life-threatening situations… And when they did get information, it was inaccurate, repeatedly. They want to know why it is so hard to get a reimbursement for spoiled food and medication, but they also want to know who is ultimately funding those reimbursements — should that not come from the company and executives whose mismanagement led to their losses, instead of from ratepayers? Most importantly they want to know that real reform and accountability will be instituted in the wake of the failed storm response,” he stated.
“The Department of Public Service and my colleagues are responsible for storm response, storm response plans, indications of plans, spoiled food reimbursements all across the state. It so happened that on Long Island we developed our storm recovery recommendations but they are ultimately authorized by the LIPA Board of Trustees; in the rest of New York State they get authorized ultimately by the State Public Service Commission. The standards are the same but there is a LIPA involvement as they are the contract holder of the PSEG Long Island contract, and LIPA is an essential partner in holding PSEG-LI accountable in some of the relevant effects on customers,” Public Service Commission Chairman and CEO of the State Public Service Department John B. Rhodes said on August 20.
Many Long Island residents were disappointed in the stance PSEG-LI took on reimbursement, which according to the company’s website, would reimburse residential customers “up to $250 for food spoilage and commercial customers up to $5,000 if their service was interrupted for 72 hours or more because of Tropical Storm Isaias. Food spoilage claims of $150 or less must include an itemized list.”
Rhodes added that the Public Service Commission pressed Gov. Andrew Cuomo, LIPA and PSEG Long Island to have reimbursements for food and medications to come from their shareholder monies and not from the accounts receivable from customers. “PSEG-LI forfeiting its performance bonus is a uniquely available way of doing this. We are continuing our investigation, and as we find more failures that warrant further accountability, we will impose sanctions that match up to that. This is a first step but with this step, that spoilage compensation is coming out of PSEG’s corporate wallet,” Rhodes noted.
Sen. Kaminsky said he sees that the same pool of money would come still from ratepayers and collecting from previous years’ performance bonuses should be the avenue for funding reimbursement. Rhodes reiterated “this is only the first step.”
Sen. Gaughran, who chairs the Senate Standing Committee on Local Government, told the Public Service Commission he appreciates their work and he admires some of their “out of the box ideas, in terms of how we deal specifically here on Long Island with the issues from PSEG Long Island.” Gaughran pressed the Commission for answers on oversight and scrutiny of PSEG-LI’s Storm Management Communications. He asked how many full-time employees LIPA has on its staff to conduct the oversight. Congdon said there are over 50 such employees of LIPA operating in this type of role, but he deferred to LIPA representatives to confirm this total later in the meeting.
Regarding the breakdown of communications systems, Sen. Gaughran asked the Commission what standards for redundancy the utility is required to have so that one provider can’t be blamed when the entire system “crashes.”
Chairman Rhodes said the Commission is looking into this issue; “they have requirements for redundancy but we do not yet know whether those were not met or whether there was a failing that took everything down at once…this was an outcome that you know and they (PSEG-LI and LIPA) know that we can’t accept,” he said.
Congdon said that as the operator of a facility that has telecomm requirements, the utility must ensure, for the customer of that telecomm service, that the service “can meet their most extreme needs.”
“We believe that for instance any utility that has a call center or requires telecomm service, that needs to be stood up, appropriately, with the right level of service,” he commented.
Underground Utilities Replacing Poles?
During the August 20 hearing, Senator Leroy Comrie (representing New York’s 14th Senatorial District) explained that in Brooklyn, Queens, many areas of Long Island and the entire region, most of the wooden utility pole designs was invented before the Civil War, over 160 years ago.
“Sandy was the storm we were supposed to all learn from, and things were going to be different. Nearly eight years later today we had a storm predicted and plotted, yet only a few hours of tropical winds brought large segments of the state to its knees. Because of poor planning and response that happened from utilities all across the state, losing power temporarily is one thing but losing it throughout entire communities in New York State, for weeks, is totally unacceptable in this day and age. This is 2020 we need to do better and find ways to create resilience in our systems and to create safety. In this time of COVID-19 people are more dependent on power to work from home, live and survive than ever before, we cannot afford to have utilities treating our public in this way.”
“The utility companies need to be transparent in what they are doing and we cannot accept anything less than the total transformation of the system — it means burying the power lines and flood proofing the infrastructure, making the grid smart so our communities can never go dark again,” Sen. Comrie stated at the hearing.
Chairman Rhodes replied to this assessment, as well as a question from State Assemblyman Michael Cusick and said it is definitely time to look into replacing the overhead utility wires and poles with exclusively having buried, underground utilities which won’t be taken down with heavy storms and winds and cause the debris and damage seen after Sandy (2012) and Isaias hit the region.
“I want to emphasize the importance of staffing up and downstate needs to have that ‘surge capacity’ available at the nearest call for when it’s needed. We do need to make sure that communications backbones are robust and can handle events as ‘stuff happens.’ You have to be able to survive that. And for Undergrounding — it is clearly time to revisit the cost-benefit calculation associated with Undergrounding. Clearly the costs are going up of not-Undergrounding so let’s take that on. There is a very important place in our immediate future for the distribution of resources that can basically help customers, especially any critical facilities and the like ride through events like this storm. We are welcoming all further suggestions as well moving ahead,” Rhodes said.
State Sen. Kevin Parker (who represents the 21st Senate district) said there should be an outline established of how the utilities, Commission and elected officials can work together “in order to get people and communities back into service, and make sure that the next time we have a storm that we won;t be back in this same position.”
“I am looking forward to not just hearing testimony and answers today but with the work we have ahead of us, that we need to do together in order to address the needs of constituents across New York State,” he said. Later, Sen. Comrie asked when the last time the Public Service Commission denied a rate increase proposal by one of the major utilities companies was. During the August 20 hearing he did not receive a direct answer from the Public Service Department.
State Senator Kevin Thomas, who represents New York’s 6th District including Garden City, noted that in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias there were over 100,000 Nassau County customers that were out of power. Across his district alone, covering much of the Town of Hempstead east to Levittown, Bethpage and Farmingdale, about 20,000 customers were out of power. Thomas spoke to the Public Service Commission chairman about updates to the State Mitigation Plan and the need for its updating every five years.
“In compliance with FEMA’s State Mitigation Plan, the Public Service Commission mandates that all public utilities in New York submit an annual Disaster Management and Response Plan, on or by April 1. Can you tell me which electric utilities submitted their annual plan for 2020? And as part of their plans, the utilities are supposed to conduct at least one emergency response drill. Did all of them actually do this?” he asked during the August 20 virtual State Senate hearing.
Thomas was told by Kevin Wisely, director of Resiliency and Emergency Preparedness of the Department of Public Service Office, the public utilities are required to submit their Emergency Response Plans by December 15 each year for an annual review, but there were utilities that had not completed their 2020 drill by the August 20 hearing date due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “but they are still expected to conduct those drills during this year,” Wisely said.
Thomas said it is unacceptable to not have information on and disclose which utilities did not conduct their emergency drill this year:
“Here we have utilities that are not serving New Yorkers. We are here today with a hearing to try to figure out what exactly is going on, and this is the body that oversees the state’s utilities. The ball is in your court right now….you must be able to answer that question if those utilities failed to do their prep work. We have outages and we keep pointing the finger at these utility companies but if the Public Service Commission is not doing the work that you should be doing, they are going to continue with this nonsense. This is completely unacceptable — understood?!” Sen. Thomas said.