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June 29 was my first day home following a brief vacation. By late that Thursday afternoon, life had returned to normal. Suitcases were unpacked, dinner was on the stove, and my wife and I prepared for a quiet evening. Then the sky turned dark, the wind kicked up, and just as we looked out to see what mother nature had in store for us, there was an explosion.
It was the fuse next to a transformer just across the street from our house. It blew. The lights went out, and we were in trouble. I predicted the power would be down overnight at the very least.
See, the fuse in question blows multiple times a year. It’s always the result of a localized problem (a tree branch on the power line down the block this time.) The resulting darkness affects just 44 homes. Fifty or fewer customers is a low-priority outage for Indianapolis utility AES.
And so, for the next 44 hours, we were out of power. We elected to stay home and rough it. When the juice came back on that Saturday, I called my daughter to find out that she and her husband lost power late Friday. They moved in with us. Their power stayed out until Monday evening.
I spell this out to establish that we were inconvenienced. Yet I was patient. That comes in part because my family once owned a small power company. I have some idea of what it’s like to be on the other side of an outage.
That’s right, my grandfather built a coal generator in 1917 in a Minnesota town where there was no electricity. The company grew to serve two small communities and 20 farms until my father and his brother sold it in 1986.
In high school and college, I worked on crews that restored outages, including the time when I was pulling on a downed power line and lightning struck the pole nearest me, sending a charge my direction. My arms jerked from my waist to high over my head. Twice. I was not hurt.
My dad wasn’t always so lucky. He received serious burns on two occasions after coming in contact with high voltage.
So I get the safety concerns that can lead to slower outage responses, but I also know that what the power company wants is to sell electricity. It’s why the utility exists.
In fact, comments I’ve heard from neighbors and seen online from people who attack the power company’s response irk me. Some of those same people are unwilling to trim the trees they own that often lead to the problem.
I even saw where one impatient homeowner climbed his own ladder and removed a tree branch from a power line. Nuts.
Now, don’t get the idea that I’m completely on the side of AES. Clearly, the company can do a better job of informing customers. The continuous message of “crews continue to work” gets old when food is going to waste in warm refrigerators and freezers. It would be easy to say, “We won’t fix smaller outages for two or three days.” Phones go unanswered and email notifications are slow to arrive.
And AES, ironically, requested a rate increase from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission the same week as the big outage. The request calls for a 13% increase in the average bill for a residential customer. Thirteen percent.
I just have to say that, while I was sitting in the dark, that seemed a little high.•
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Shella hosted WFYI’s “Indiana Week in Review” for 25 years and covered Indiana politics for WISH-TV for more than three decades. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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I have to wonder that as the frequency of weather events seems to be increasing. we keep rushing out there and putting things back exactly like they were.
I know people hate aggressive tree trimming, but it’s those same trees that cause most of the problems. It’s a trade off between trees and reliable power, but it doen’t have to be. I remember living in England when they had country wide gale force winds over the course of several hours. We are talking about streight line winds gusting to 60-70 miles an hour. There were NO widespread power outages.
In England most of the utilities were underground, out of sight and away from harm from the wind. It costs more, but the reilibility is much higher.
I used to work for IPL and I know that they take their reliability numbers seriously. To keep those numbers manageable, trees have to be trimmed aggressively, but maybe there’s another way?