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The Nashville Electric Service was fundamentally unprepared in key areas for an event as severe as the historic winter storm that struck the city in January, according to a preliminary after-action review released Friday afternoon by the utility.
The report, prepared by the New York-based PA Consulting Group, says the utility had no damage prediction model for estimating resource needs ahead of the storm and an insufficient response plan for a storm of that size.
Five people died in the aftermath of the ice storm, which left more than 230,000 electric service customers without power at its peak. Some outages lasted more than two weeks as temperatures remained consistently below freezing. The utility response left Nashvillians, literally and figuratively, in the dark, prompting outrage among residents, criticism from Mayor Freddie O’Connell and some calls for CEO Teresa Broyles-Aplin to be fired.
The Electric Power Board, which oversees the Nashville Electric Service, retained Nashville attorneys Aubrey Harwell and Bill Harbison in February to lead an inquiry into the response. A final report is due in June.
The preliminary report also highlighted areas “where NES’s restoration efforts went well and deserved to be recognized.” Among them was the fact that the utility’s restoration efforts only resulted in 17 minor injuries and no serious injuries to workers or the public. It also applauds the utility for deviating from industry norms and dispatching line crews and service crews to work on primary and secondary power lines simultaneously. There was “little to no evidence” of those crews “having to wait around for work assignments or materials.”
But elsewhere, the report confirms what city residents and officials were saying amid the crisis — that NES was not prepared.
The utility’s Emergency Response Plan is “generally aligned with industry practices,” according to the report, but “lacks sufficient detail to be consistently actionable.”
“Key elements such as checklists, standardized processes and clear procedural guidance are not defined, leading to a reliance on institutional knowledge and the individuals filling those roles,” the report reads. “As a result, the ERP functions more as a high-level reference guide than a practical tool, as observed during Winter Storm Fern.”
Moreover, the plan reportedly only conceived of a worst-case scenario in which 50,000 customers experienced power outages. The reality turned out to be more than four times that number.
Another finding in the report is that the utility’s incident command structure lacked continuity and included two positions — damage assessment team leader and safety & transportation coordinator — that were “not staffed during the storm response.”
Before the storm arrived, according to the report, the electric service lacked a way to estimate the damage caused by a storm of that magnitude and the resources needed after it.
“NES did not have a damage prediction model prior to Winter Storm Fern impacting its service territory,” the report said. “NES has never utilized more than 500 outside resources in large-scale restorations, and did not have a reliable way of determining the number of resources needed to recover from Winter Storm Fern. By the time resource requests were made, NES was in a passive position of being resource takers in the sense that they were taking whatever resources were made available as restoration crews were released from utilities that were not impacted.”
The report also details shortcomings with the utility’s strategy for providing estimated times of restoration as well as an approach to public communications that “lacked the structure, governance, data access and leadership needed to operate as a unified crisis communications effort, resulting in delayed and inconsistent communications.”
The utility’s board pledged to make changes in the wake of the report.
“The scale of Winter Storm Fern tested every aspect of NES operations,” said Anne Davis, chair of the Electric Power Board. “This independent, interim report provides a third-party assessment of where improvements are needed, and we are committed to ensuring the appropriate actions are taken to improve our infrastructure and customer service.”
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This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.