Even as Commonwealth Edison encourages people to file reimbursement forms for food spoiled during weekend blackouts, the utility has not yet decided whether to fight those claims before the Illinois Commerce Commission.
The primary North Side power outage was so widespread and lasted so long that it was the first to trigger an 18-month-old state law requiring utilities to pay “replacement value of all goods damaged” in a blackout. The law also could force ComEd to reimburse the city for emergency services it provided because the power went out.
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But there’s a catch. The law says a utility can request a waiver from the ICC and not pay for the losses if the blackout was caused by “unpreventable damage due to weather events or conditions.”
ComEd executives on Sunday still were weighing whether to argue that the heat, not some fault in their system, led to blackouts across the North Side beginning Friday.
“We are aware of the guidelines in the new law, and we need to look at that situation,” ComEd spokesman Steve Solomon said Sunday evening.
The utility has 30 days to request a waiver. A key to the decision could be whether outdated equipment led to the failure.
While the City of Chicago has extracted promises from ComEd to upgrade a system that even the utility has acknowledged is inadequate, the company has just begun the years of work to beef it up and prevent future blackouts.
“When a system is as poor as ComEd’s was, it takes time to repair, and we will be at risk throughout this summer, next summer, and even after that,” said Bill Abolt, the city’s commissioner of environment and the point man for dealing with ComEd.
About 10,000 households and businesses in Chicago still were without power Sunday evening, two days after a series of blackouts began hitting the North and Northwest Sides. ComEd said it hoped to have all of the power restored sometime after midnight.
Friday’s problems began with a short circuit in a link between a substation ComEd has upgraded and one that the city has long complained is inadequate. The short circuit snowballed into a colossal and complex blackout, leaving 60,000 homes without fans or air conditioners.
The cable shorted underground between the Northwest Substation, at Addison Street and California Avenue, and the Cortland Street Substation, which serves Bucktown. While the Northwest Substation was updated after a 1995 fire, the Cortland Substation is on a list of substations to be improved next year.
“It does show how the system is all connected,” Abolt said. “When something fails, it triggers a failure somewhere else. Until you get the whole thing fixed, these things are going to happen.”
Abolt said the city has not yet begun to calculate its expenses related to the blackouts, but, like thousands of homeowners with rotten milk and hamburgers in their refrigerators, it will file a claim against ComEd.
“It was hot, but not the hottest day ever, and you can expect hot days in the summertime,” Abolt said.
Martin Cohen, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, said ComEd could have prevented the outages with better facilities and more backup equipment.
“Three percent of ComEd’s customers suffered prolonged outages and 97 percent didn’t, so it was preventable,” Cohen said. “We’ll see whose logic the Commerce Commission will buy.”
Cohen said ComEd has not done enough to maintain its infrastructure and is making excuses in saying the problem was caused by record-setting demand.
“Next summer, when it gets up into the high 90s as we can confidently predict it will, they should be prepared for another record peak in demand,” Cohen said. “We have a booming economy, a growing population and lowering electricity rates, so a growing demand for electricity is not going to go away.”
ComEd is making claim forms available to those who call 800-Edison-1 or visit the company’s Internet site (www.ucm.com). The city also plans to make the forms available at libraries.
Other bedeviling technicalities could arise before the Commerce Commission.
For example, not everyone who lost power over the weekend will necessarily be able to claim reimbursement under the law. It is possible that only those who lost power Friday because of the malfunction of the Northwest Substation will meet the technical requirements specified in the law: suffering a blackout that affected 30,000 customers and lasted more than four hours.
In Commonwealth Edison’s eyes, there were dozens of separate blackouts over the weekend that had nothing to do with the Northwest Substation. Even if ComEd says those outages were its fault, the outages technically might be considered too small to qualify for reimbursement.
The 3,900 Lakeview residents who lost power at 5:21 p.m. Saturday and remained without power Sunday afternoon, for instance, could be considered a distinct outage caused by a cable failure–not necessarily the result of the massive failure at the Northwest Substation.
Fixing blame for the blackouts could be as difficult as untangling the massive network of wires in the regional grid, because one problem begets another.
This much ComEd engineers know already: Transformers blew and massive electrical cables burnt out because electricity abhors a vacuum and rushes to fill it, sometimes heating equipment until it literally melts or catches fire.
The problem began Friday when temperatures above 100 degrees heated roads, which transferred the heat to the ground and cables buried beneath them. One buried cable leading from the Northwest Substation to the Cortland Substation shorted out, and ComEd workers began to repair it.
“As the heat wave persists, these cables are carrying very heavy loads, and the ground warms up around them, so there is no way for them to dissipate heat,” said Paul McCoy, a ComEd senior vice president. “Typically, what happens is the insulation fails and the inner conductor shorts out.”
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Once they thought they had fixed the cable, workers at the Northwest Substation connected it to a transformer and switched it on. But the cable immediately shorted out again, causing one of four massive transformers in the substation to “trip,” just like a toaster turns off when a fuse blows.
The substation then was working with only three of its four transformers, meaning each was shouldering a larger percentage of the load on a record-setting day for electricity demand.
For some unknown reason, one of the remaining three transformers suddenly failed.
With energy demand at its peak, the electricity that had been flowing through the three transformers began flowing through only two.
Automatic systems on one of the transformers recognized that it was overloaded and switched it off. That left only one transformer working, and ComEd crews quickly began cutting off power to huge blocks of customers to keep it from overloading too.
Many of these customers were without power most of Friday night, and thousands were not reconnected until Saturday.
On Sunday, Streets and Sanitation Department crews patrolled North Side alleys in search of rotten food, concerned that it could pose a health threat.
“We are all angry that the outages occurred in the first place,” Mayor Richard Daley said Sunday, “and people deserve and expect immediate answers from Commonwealth Edison about why the outages occurred and what will be done to reimburse them for perishables.”