MOUNT VERNON — Officials from American Electric Power met with representatives of the city of Mount Vernon and The Knox County Emergency Management Agency as well as the Mount Vernon News to discuss the performance of the utility company’s efforts during the aftermath of Hurricane Ike’s reach to Central Ohio.

Mount Vernon Mayor Richard K. Mavis and EMA Director Marie Blubaugh met with AEP officials Joseph Hamrock, president and CEO; Timothy Wells, manager community relations; Gary McGhee, manager distribution services; and Terri M. Flora, director of corporate communications.

Hamrock began the meeting with an overview of the storm and the problems it caused with the utility’s efforts to restore power to its customers.

The biggest problem was that the extent and force of the storm was totally unexpected by anyone.

“We had no inkling this would happen,” Hamrock said. “What we found was in a typical weather advance we reach out to the closest available external resources for help. But this hit all of Ohio and Kentucky and went into Pennsylvania. These are places we might go for help. But they all got hit, too. We always look to our sister companies, AEP is in 11 states. We did get a lot of help from Appalachian Power, our sister companies in Virginia and West Virginia. At noon (on Monday) we had a commitment from them to send up about half of their work force.”

It had been rumored that part of the problem with AEP’s initial response was that most of its local linemen had been sent to Houston, Texas to help restore power there. Although some had been sent, it was by no means all.

“Out of a local work force of about 600 linemen we had only sent about 50,” noted Hamrock. “And not all of them had left. But we called them back right away.”

Getting help from crews from other states also took time. There was not just the matter of the time it took crews to get to their destination, there is the matter of assigning crews and giving them local guides who knew the area and the grid system.

“This industry we’re in can only get through these kinds of events with that mutual assistance,” Hamrock added. “By the second day, we were at 3,000 strong, which is triple our normal compliment of our normal employees and contractors.”

Mavis asked Hamrock about AEP’s policy on restoration policies.

“Is it the squeaky wheel?” Mavis asked. “I know a lot of people believe that. And a lot believe the affluent areas get their power back first.”

“I get a lot of the squeaky wheel calls,” Hamrock said. “It’s hospitals, emergency responders at the top of the list. AEP has a single emergency response policy and plan that everybody follows. That basic prioritization scheme is the same everywhere.”

Damage assessment is one of the keys to restoring power in an efficient manner. This is done pretty much in an old-fashioned way, by calls from customers and driving around and eyeballing.

“This is a thing where people have a perception that there’s a light lighting up on a board somewhere,” Hamrock said. “There’s no light for George’s house. We have typically at the substation level, the ability to see remotely whether the substation breaker is open or closed. Beyond that we have what we call a recloser that opens and closes to try to correct a fault on the line. We can’t see from our dispatch center whether a recloser is open or closed.”

“I think we had about 600 breakers blow during the outage,” said McGhee. “It took a couple days to work through that.”

Calls from customers are perhaps the most important tool the company has to work with. Watching the pattern of where the calls are coming from gives them a very good idea of where the problems are. AEP received more than 1 million calls throughout Ohio during the outages.

“Beyond that we are dependent on customer’s call reporting what they see,” Hamrock added. “We had nearly a half million in the first day, and believe me, there’s a lot of good information in those calls. Not just what the caller tells us but the pattern of the calls.”

After that it is trained crews going out to assess the damage and see what kinds of tools, materials and equipment is needed in a certain area.

After that assessment is made, work crews are assigned to work certain areas. Since out-of-state crews are not familiar with how the grid system works or even how to get around, each of those crews is assigned a local worker to be a guide. All of these processes take some time.

Hamrock was asked about tree trimming and the debris being left behind and not being cleaned up immediately.

“When we bring tree crews in for an outage of this magnitude our immediate concern is to restore power,” Hamrock said. “If we did our normal cleanup mode it would take weeks to restore power.”

Estimates for restoring power are based on the magnitude of the outage. This is something that is not always apparent right away.

“By late Sunday night, we were seeing all the calls coming in and we knew we were going to have a seven- to 10-day event,” Hamrock explained. “I think that’s the message we put out Sunday night. We could say we’re working as fast as we can and it might be a day or two. But we think most people want to know what the situation really is.”

With excessive power outages, many residents throughout the county lost a lot of perishable goods.

“How do you handle the people who lost $500 worth of food,” Mavis asked. “Do they threaten to sue you?”

“Unfortunately, we can’t cover those expenses,” said Flora. “But what we do is refer them to the insurance companies. Many times homeowner’s insurance will cover at least part of that cost.”

The cost of the restoration and cleanup efforts will not be known for some time. However, a question that must be on many people’s minds is how will this affect their electric bills?

“We don’t know what we’re going to do yet,” Hamrock said. “We might go to the utilities commission and ask for a storm surcharge but we might not.”