National Grid restores power within eight hours of tornado

Aug. 10—TURIN — During major weather events like the tornado in Lewis County on Monday, it can sometimes be days for people to see their power restored. On Monday night into Tuesday in Lewis County, however, National Grid says residents just lost power for up to eight hours.

Jared Paventi, spokesperson for National Grid, said response during storms like this starts earlier in the day, before the storm hits.

The operations team will look at what the weather could be for the day, so they knew that thunderstorms, heavy rain and lightning were possible. They then made the decision to hold crews past their shift in order for the night crew to have a full supplement of staff to back them up.

Crews were at their crew areas located throughout the tri-county area and when it was safe to put the crews on the road, they went out to get people back online.

"We're never going to put any of our crews in harm's way to go out and do a repair," Paventi said. "We're going to let the weather subside, because it's simply just not safe to put a bucket truck up in the air when you have winds that are exceeding 60, 70 mph."

He added that the time also allows for National Grid to understand where the most damage is, allowing them to deploy crews to assess the damage. They then assess the necessary repairs and see if they need additional equipment.

One way they will restore power is by what is called "switching."

Paventi describes switching as rerouting power on a distribution network to get power to some customers.

"We're not always able to restore everyone off of switching," he said.

Crews are also in contact with the regional control team.

"There's different crews that specialize in different parts of our system, so that way when we do have a situation like this we can get people out on the road and respond as quickly as we can," he said.

How long people are without power depends on the type of outage, Paventi said. For example, customers in the Lowville area were without power for an hour due to a tree fall.

"It really comes down to the type of outage," he said.

If a distribution line goes down, which is what is generally seen on the streets, dozens of customers could lose power. But when a sub-transmission line goes down in a more populated area such as Lowville, hundreds of people can be without power. With a transmission line, outages vary based on where it comes down.

Paventi said there was a transmission lockout at a substation, which resulted in one branch coming out of the substation losing electricity — that took about 600 customers offline for about eight hours. Another branch of that transmission line went down in a different direction, knocking out power for about 1,100 customers for about an hour.

"We're trying to parse down who's affected, what may be affecting it and then trying to restore them as quickly and as safely as we can," he said.

At its peak on Monday night, more than 5,000 customers were without power, according to the National Grid outage map.

Paventi said that looking at the notes from the storm, it appears the storm mostly took down trees — but not poles — which makes repairs go quicker.

It is unclear how many people were working out on the road.

The tornado lifted off of the ground at 8:14 p.m. Monday in Turin and the first outage was reported right around that time.

Power went off in Turin because of several trees coming down and taking out the power line, Paventi said.

Paventi said crews got to the scene between 9 and 10 p.m., and customers were without power in that area for a total of five hours. He said that's because they wanted to ensure it was safe for crews to go out.

No injuries to crew members were reported by National Grid.

"This is what we do, we respond to emergencies — whether it's ice, whether it's snow, whether it's a tornado or a thunderstorm," he said. "Our crews are highly trained, highly skilled to go out there and work safely... We pride ourselves on getting people restored as quickly as we can."

Paventi is also warning people that if they come across a downed power line to stay away from it and call 911 as soon as possible.