Even though the sun came out Monday afternoon, the storm hadn’t really passed at all.
More than 300,000 homes and businesses were still without power Monday night as electricians slogged from one downed line to another, trying to undo the most debilitating if not the biggest blackout in decades in the Chicago area.
Commonwealth Edison estimated that as many as one quarter of those customers would still be in the dark Wednesday night.
The storm was so freakish it even took down power lines in a strange way–the wires didn’t just fall down, they flew up and off the poles.
As unlikely as it seems, the wind-driven snow stuck to the sides of the wires, giving them the aerodynamics of an airplane wing. They rose in the wind, then whipped around like jump ropes in a display linemen call “galloping wires.”
The storm, packing everything from slush to thunder, wrought other damage and inconvenience as well.
Technically not a blizzard–the 50-mile-an hour wind gusts didn’t last long enough–the storm was blamed for at least one death. A 46-year-old Libertyville man was killed when his car slid through the crossing gates and struck a Metra train.
Travel was treacherous everywhere. On some expressways, drivers couldn’t get off if they wanted to, the exit ramps were so choked with spun-out cars. Schools became warming centers.
But just as quickly as it struck, the snowstorm passed, giving way first to sunshine, then a gibbous moon.
Even though everyone acknowledges that the storm was a whopper destined to do damage, some reprised charges that Edison does not spend enough on maintaining its power lines. They wondered if it really had to be so bad, and whether Edison had done everything it could to keep the system reliable.
No one doubted Edison workers were out in force.
Some 600 crews were working to get 1,500 downed wires back on the poles, restoring customers at the rate of about 10,000 to 20,000 an hour.
Though the weather calmed in the afternoon, it did little to melt the snow and ice clinging to the wires, leading Edison to forecast that more lines could topple if the winds picked up as predicted.
“You have to get the ice off the wires, which would require a few days above freezing,” said Paul McCoy, an Edison vice president.
Indeed, the number of households and businesses without power rose from 275,000 to 300,000 late Monday, even though Edison had restored power to 118,000 customers. Edison couldn’t say how many of those were repeat outages–customers who had lost power more than once–and there were fears that the numbers could go much higher if winds picked up Monday night.
The peculiar outage was caused by a conspiracy of wind and sticky snow.
The “galloping wires” phenomenon is familiar to utilities in northern states. In 1992, a 25-mile stretch of super high-voltage wire went down in Minnesota after the wires started flying.
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Edison’s wires meet the specifications of the National Electrical Safety Code, which requires Chicago’s wires to be as hefty as those strung up in such hard-winter towns as Minneapolis and Buffalo.
The wires must be able to hold a solid coating of 1 1/2 inches of ice in a sustained 60-mile-per-hour wind. That design can be foiled, however, if the wires begin to gallop.
Edison officials said that in addition to the galloping wires, some wires fell because trees, overloaded with snow, toppled onto them.
“We can’t impose our design standard on trees,” said Greg Welch, an Edison vice president.
For more than a decade, Edison has fought charges that it has shortchanged maintenance of its wire grid.
In 1992, an Illinois Commerce Commission report noted that power outages had increased 32 percent over a four-year period.
“Commonwealth Edison’s distribution system performance has declined since 1986, and (Edison) has failed to meet its own reliability goals during the same period,” the report said.
The report noted that on a per-customer basis, Edison’s spending on maintaining its power grid was below industry averages.
In 1995, the Citizens Utility Board analyzed Edison’s budget proposals for power lines, comparing the forecasts with what the company actually spent.
The company had told the commerce commission that it expected to spend $1.59 billion on power lines between 1990 and 1993. But by 1994, the company had spent 27 percent less than that.
“There was $585 million they had proposed spending, and their engineering group said needed to be spent, that they didn’t spend,” said Martin Cohen, CUB’s executive director.
The trend continued. In 1995, Edison told the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that it expected to spend $455 million on power lines in 1997. By the end of that year, though, the company had actually spent $34 million less than that.
The 1998 budget is even less.
“I cannot say that was the specific cause of these outages, but when you spend less money on standard maintenance in a city with big snowstorms, over time you are going to pay the price,” said Howard Learner of the Environmental Law & Policy Center.
In defense, Edison officials point out that its lines are inspected regularly and replaced when testing indicates fatigue.
“We do what we need to keep the system reliable, and it is reliable,” said Gerhard Wald, an Edison spokesman. “It is not dollar driven, it is driven by the work that needs to be done.”
Now, the most immediate work is getting the lines back up–a project Edison estimates will cost as much as $6 million.
Edison officials said they could not predict when power to any one area would be restored, but expected to have 75 percent of the customers back in service by Wednesday evening.
Most of the rest, officials said, would likely be done by Thursday.
Edison had 600 crews out Monday and had asked out-of-state utilities for help.
Out on the street, Edison crew boss Fred McKinney didn’t have to try very hard to think about the Chicago families who are living without power. His was one of them.
McKinney was working with a crew of eight to restore a group of power lines running below the Stevenson Expressway at 31st and Wood Streets.
Some of the crew members had been working on 7,200-volt lines since 3 a.m.
About 3 p.m., the workers said they hadn’t eaten yet that day.
“We haven’t had much, just coffee, but once you get going on a job like this you want to keep going because you know people don’t have their power,” said Russ Romo.
Many of the line workers had begun to believe they may get this winter off.
“We were all thinking one month to go. Then the call: Trouble. Put your clothes on,” McKinney said, shrugging his shoulders. “But it’s Chicago. You’ve got to expect it.”