Inside Peco’s race to get power back for 139,000 customers after a massive August storm

The summertime thunderstorm plunged the skies into darkness in a matter of minutes.

Winds gusted to 50 mph, roaring through trees and sending unsecured objects sailing through the air.

Rain fell sideways, pounding on windows.

Phones vibrated with tornado warnings, sending families to shelter in their basements.

Then, in about 139,000 homes across the region, the lights went out.

As quickly as the storm — among the worst Peco officials could recall — blew in that Monday evening, Aug. 7, it cleared.

But for Peco employees, the work was just beginning.

For lineworker Nicholas Gualberti, Aug. 7 started normally.

During his regular morning meeting around 6 o’clock, he heard about severe weather forecast for later that day. It’s an announcement that is a regular occurrence in summers.

The rest of his shift consisted of the usual maintenance work on poles and transformers.

As morning turned to afternoon, he went back to his North Philadelphia service building to empty the truck of trash, discarding old wires or other broken equipment his crew had replaced that morning.

Early that afternoon, the text came in from his boss: Level 3. Mandatory overtime.

That meant the length of his shift was doubling, going from eight to 16 hours. Gualberti and his fellow lineworkers let their families know they wouldn’t be home until late that night.

Once that text went out, scheduled work was canceled for the day, Gualberti said. They waited and prepared, knowing that dispatchers would soon have plenty for them to do

“At that point, you kind of get into storm mode,” he said. “We spend a lot of time stocking the trucks with material [such as bolts, electrical connectors, and spare wire], just to make sure we have everything on the truck we may need. You never know what you’re going to get.”

Crews also make sure they have enough water, ice, and food to sustain themselves for the long night ahead.

Around 6:30 p.m., the storm arrived. From their building on Luzerne Street, Gualberti and his crew watched their phones and computer screens, seeing the number of customer outages skyrocket in minutes.

“It was worse than we thought. We thought it was just going to be a little bit of rain,” Gualberti said. “We all say, ‘OK, we’re going to be on mandatory 16-hour shifts for the next five days.’ … We’re going to be busy.”

For consumers, even the threat of a power outage can trigger anxiety.

When the forecast calls for severe weather, they have little control over their fate. They don’t know whether they’ll lose power, and if they do, they don’t know how long it’ll be out.

Losing power for a night can be novel, forcing families to play board games by candlelight in the absence of WiFi-fueled entertainment.

Losing it for longer might mean throwing out hundreds of dollars worth of groceries or having to stay with relatives or friends for a few nights.

An outage can lead to health complications and even death for people who rely on medical equipment.

It’s a reality that Peco workers say is top of mind when severe weather strikes. It certainly was on Aug. 7

As soon as the storm hit, the on-call storm team jumped into action at the Plymouth Meeting headquarters. Per Peco protocol, the system incident commander was in charge, said Nicole LeVine, the chief operating officer.

In some storms, the commander directs workers to go directly to 911 centers, hospitals, or other “critical life-sustaining businesses” to make sure they can keep operating, though Peco officials didn’t recall that being an issue on Aug. 7.

Some executive members of the storm team — which includes hundreds of on-call employees companywide and rotates every two months — huddled around a U-shaped table in the emergency operations center, or EOC, a windowless room in the bowels of the Plymouth Meeting building.

The storm team piloted the plane, with the EOC as their cockpit. They set companywide goals, including estimated restoration times, monitored whether they were on track to meet these goals, and maintained regular communication with their colleagues.

From the EOC, public information officers kept customers up to date, writing Facebook posts, tweets, and texts, and responding to media requests.

They looked, too, at what customers were sharing by call, text, or the Peco app, and shared pertinent details with dispatchers upstairs in the operations control center, or OCC.

There, Bernadette Boyle, senior manager of the OCC, served as an air traffic controller of sorts.

As shift managers around the room monitor computer screens that show live circuit maps of each county, Boyle helps dispatchers decide where to send teams of lineworkers, Peco contractors, and other field workers to address safety concerns and repair damage.

As the storm made its way through the region, Boyle recalled alarms going off from those computers nonstop, each one indicating that more people were losing power. Meanwhile, police and fire department officials called in, asking for Peco’s assistance in responding to public-safety issues, which take top priority.

Elsewhere in the OCC, Ali Walker was also directing traffic as senior manager of field operations for distribution system operations’ trouble department.

Walker directs the so-called trouble men — lineworkers who patrol in single-person trucks — to everyday emergencies that range from a downed pole or wire to a transformer issue or an isolated outage. Storm or no storm, they’re often Peco’s first line of defense, doing work that can be done by one worker before a larger crew can respond to an incident.

In the wake of the storm, Walker assessed the damage, thinking about where to send workers.

Boyle, Walker, and other supervisors could see that Delaware and Chester Counties were among the hardest hit. As of 7:30 p.m., more than 69,000 of 101,000 remaining outages were in those counties, according to Peco data.

Walker honed in even more on the hardest-hit spots in each county. She identified areas that required a more concentrated effort, including Concord, Delaware County; Nottingham, Chester County; and the Pencoyd section of Lower Merion, in Montgomery County.

Walker worked to set up single points of contact for response in each of those areas and dispatched mobile command centers.

Peco officials said they prioritize efficiency, with supervisors asking themselves: How can we get power restored to the most people as quickly as possible?

“If an entire circuit is out with a significant number of customers, we’ll focus on those first,” LeVine said. “We may isolate the damage, get as many customers back on — say we got it down to a small number of customers — and then move on to that next event that say has 1,000-plus customers” without power.

In North Philadelphia, Gualberti and his crew of lineworkers were dispatched Monday night to a home where a tree had fallen, taking with it 13,000-volt power lines, far more powerful — and dangerous — than the 120-volt power in customers’ homes.

The transformer fell with the pole, which landed on two parked cars and ripped siding off the house, he recalled.

“That was something that took 16 hours alone,” he said. ”We have to order the pole. The truck comes out, delivers us [the new pole. Run to building and grab a new transformer. Put the new pole in the ground.”

When Gualberti began his 45-minute drive home around 10 p.m., crews were still working on that job.

By 11 p.m., Boyle and Walker left the operations control center in Plymouth Meeting, about 16 hours after their workday began.

On Walker’s drive home, she came across a downed wire in South Philadelphia. When employees see that, they are advised to stay on the scene until crews arrived.

So Walker put her car into park and called back to the operations control center.

When Walker and Boyle returned to the OCC around 7 a.m. Tuesday, they were relieved to see that the number of customer outages had been reduced by more than half overnight. About 37,000 customers remained without power then, down from 101,000 the night before.

“It’s satisfying in a way,” Boyle said. But as the days go on, “you’re really getting into the damage,” with crews moving on to the work that is more difficult.

One of Gualberti’s first jobs Tuesday was responding to a fire in a customer’s backyard. A tree had fallen on wires, he said, and ignited.

With an extinguisher kept in the truck, Gualberti and his partner put out the fire, turned off the power, and called a tree crew to move it away from the wire.

Then, a four- or five-person crew arrived for the longer haul, ready to sit with the tree trimmers and put protective covering over the wire.

Gualberti, meanwhile, was off to another job.

After the Aug. 7 storm, 80% of affected customers saw power restored in less than 24 hours, the company said, and about 99% saw their power restored in less than three days.