Linemen Warnings Finally Get Malloy’s Attention
by Christine Stuart | Nov 1, 2011 4:59pm
(7) Comments | Commenting has expired
Posted to: Energy, Labor, Weather
As criticism mounts about the number of linemen utilities have out trying to get the lights back on across Connecticut, the governor’s top energy official has finally found time to meet with a union official who tried to bring the problem to the administration’s attention.
That meeting—between Frank Cirillo, business manager of IBEW Local 420; and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Daniel C. Esty, a favorite on the utility industry’s paid consultant and speaker payroll—is scheduled for Wednesday morning.
Cirillo had been trying to get that meeting ever since Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the state and plunged hundreds of thousands of homes into darkness. He sent two letters to Malloy. Malloy never responded but forwarded the request to Esty. After crews turned out to be undermanned for this past weekend’s freak snowstorm, Cirillo branded the governor an “idiot” for ignoring the warnings.
Esty said Tuesday that it had all been a mistake. His staff had mistaken the union official with another man by the same name—a Democratic Party boss. Esty did meet with that Frank Cirillo.
The meeting, which was supposed to take place after Tropical Storm Irene, was initially ignored until Frank Cirillo, business manager of IBEW Local 420, spoke about it with CT News Junkie Monday.
Those developments occurred amid a fast-moving backdrop of events Tuesday, as officials revealed that it may take longer than a week for Connecticut Light & Power to get power restored to the last of some 800,000 customers in the state that lost electricity.
Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton echoed Cirillo’s concerns about CL&P having too few linemen in the field. Half of Danbury remains without power.
“The bottom line here is that CL&P does not have enough workers working for them,” Boughton said. “Everybody’s afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. But the emperor has no clothes. It’s time in this state where we pay the highest electric rates in the country that we demand better services from our utility providers. It’s just that simple.”
Boughton, who was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor last year, went even further.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be paying multimillion dollar salaries to the top executives in that organization and maybe we ought to go back and take some of that money and plow it back into maintenance and plow it back into repair crews, which is really what the end user experiences.”
After ignoring those warnings for months, the Malloy administration began acknowledging them Tuesday.
After touring the L.P. Wilson Community Center in Windsor, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said he’s hearing from a lot of people they believe there’s a need for more linemen.
“That’s why we have the Irene committee and that’s why the Irene committee or another committee is going to have to take a look at this incident and make some recommendations here,” Malloy said.
He said he has not discharged the committee looking at the state’s preparedness and response for Tropical Storm Irene, so it’s possible the response to this storm could be added to their agenda.
“There are things that we learned during Irene that are already being implemented in this storm, so the idea that we can build upon our experiences is one I absolutely support and I think we can get that done,” Malloy said.
Tuesday morning, after a briefing at the state’s Emergency Operations Center, Esty said he didn’t intentionally ignore Cirillo’s request for a meeting. His staff just didn’t know there are two Frank Cirillos, he claimed. Esty said he had a meeting scheduled with Frank Cirillo of Meriden, who sits on the Democratic Town Committee there, so his staff didn’t know to set up an additional meeting with Frank Cirillo who works for the IBEW.
“They saw the name Frank Cirillo on the schedule and assumed I had already met with him,” Esty said.
Esty’s spokesman said the meeting with Cirillo of Meriden was not related to linemen staffing.
The two will meet in Waterbury at the union’s offices Wednesday morning.
Earlier Tuesday Malloy and Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation asked the U.S. Department of Energy to intervene and make sure the state receives enough out-of-state mutual aid.
U.S. Department of Energy’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration Bill Bryan said the local utilities have been overwhelmed by this storm.
“If you look at the outages in Connecticut, which basically equals the outages of all the other places combined, you really don‘t have yet a fair distribution of workers from mutual assistance teams out here doing this,” Bryan said Tuesday at an afternoon press conference in the Emergency Operations Center.
With 6,000 workers expected to help out with the outages across the northeast, Bryan said he will be making some calls to make sure Connecticut gets the number of workers it needs.
“We are a little bit disappointed,” Malloy said.
Tags: Malloy, Esty, Cirillo, linemen, Irene, storm, power outage
(7) Comments
posted by: gutbomb86 | November 1, 2011 6:36pm
Trees should NEVER be able to tip over and reach a transmission line. These are not residential lots where people are fighting to keep trees from being trimmed or removed. The only way a tree should ever be responsible for knocking down a transmission line is if it were lifted out of the ground by a tornado and dropped onto a line from above or thrown into a line sideways.
Let’s be business-friendly and open the transmission corridors to selective logging by local companies—in state loggers—and get the trees away from the lines. Give us the opportunity to get our power back quickly in weather events like this. There’s no good reason that CL&P’s limited supply of line workers should have had to be repairing transmission lines instead of substations and residential lines.
We are GD lucky the temperature wasn’t 20-30 degrees colder. Wake up.
posted by: BTF | November 2, 2011 9:01am
Dan Esty “a favorite on the utility industry’s paid consultant and speaker payroll” Really Christine—you’re showing some uncharacteristic editorial bias here. Can we please just accept that’s it’s ok for the state to have an incredibly talented leader at DEEP and stop trying to tear him down “by a thousand cuts”.
posted by: Bolder63 | November 2, 2011 10:01am
The lack of line maintenance & overall improvement has been obvious for years. When was the last time anyone saw utility crews replacing poles as part of a scheduled maintenance plan? Why aren’t there improvements to the system, shouldn’t more of our utilities have been moved below ground by now? Waiting for disaster to strike is obviously not an effective strategy.
posted by: Mansfield1 | November 2, 2011 12:48pm
This mess has its roots in the de-regulation of electricty generation and distribution. Before 1998 the companies had to focus on service since their profits were regulated. So they did a bettter job of keeping the infrastructure in decent shape. Once de-regulation kicked in it was all about profits, how to drive up stock prices, stock options and enormous top executive salaries. When the Corporate Types take over it’s all about the few not the many. De-regulation created incentives for profit maximization and pressures to “just get by” on the infrastructure side.
No one shoud be surprised by this. Just worried that everytime a severe weather event hits us that we’ll be in the dark for a long while. This also parallels heathcare in the sense that when that became about profit first it got really expnsive and lots of our citizens got left out.
These outfits are run for the benefit of the stockholders, top managers and big investors. Trees, what are those? Customers, who are they?
posted by: NOW What? | November 2, 2011 1:56pm
“Mansfield1” is essentially correct (see post above). It was originally thought that deregulation of the State’s electricity and health insurance industries would result in the availability of financial capital that would be used to improve products and services, but of course it hasn’t worked out that way LOL, the result has been simply to increase profits, decrease reliability and increase costs to consumers. Connecticut *needs* to help develop non-profit alternatives, which tend to improve things all-around in industries that are absolutely essential for residents’ day-to-day survival - similar to the way that truly employee-owned supermarkets tend to provide better customer service at lower cost and to offer more jobs to boot.
If the State begins to find a way to allow the creation of more non-profit electric co-ops (or the like), non-profit health insurance, and employee-owned supermarkets, SUPPORT those efforts. You will not regret it.
