The storm that hit the region in late July snapped or leaned more than three hundred utility poles across the service territory, according to the utility’s post-event report, and cut power to just under forty thousand customers at its peak. Within seventy-two hours, service had been restored to all but around two thousand of them, a recovery pace the utility calls typical for a storm of this scale, and one that has almost nothing to do with how fast any individual crew can climb a pole.
Restoration, line supervisors say, is fundamentally a sequencing decision made before a single truck leaves the yard, not a race to fix whatever’s closest. The utility’s outage management system maps every reported fault against the grid’s actual structure, substations, feeders, and the individual branch lines running off them, and restoration follows that structure from the top down. A downed line on a residential street that feeds fifteen houses doesn’t get touched until a fault on the substation feeder serving that entire neighborhood, along with a dozen others, is fixed first, even though the substation repair might restore power to nobody directly and simply clears the path for everything downstream.
Triage before repair
“People call in and they’re angry their specific street hasn’t been touched yet, and I understand it,” said Ray Okonkwo, a field supervisor with fourteen years on storm crews. “But if we sent a crew to their street first, we might restore fifteen houses in an hour and delay four thousand houses by half a day, because that crew wasn’t working the feeder that unlocks the whole area. The math only works one way.”
That logic extends to which repairs get made at all versus which get temporarily bypassed. A crew reaching a downed line will often assess whether a full repair, replacing a snapped pole, restringing wire, resetting a transformer, is achievable within the shift, or whether a faster temporary fix, rerouting the circuit through an adjacent feeder if the network topology allows it, can restore power sooner while the permanent repair is scheduled for daylight, non-emergency conditions. Roughly a third of restorations after this storm used a temporary reroute rather than an immediate full repair, based on figures the utility shared for this piece.
Safety protocol adds time that residents rarely see accounted for. Every crew arriving at a downed line treats it as energized until it’s confirmed otherwise by direct testing, regardless of what dispatch reports, because a line that looks dead can be re-energized unexpectedly if backfeed occurs from a generator, a solar installation, or a downstream section of grid still carrying current through an unexpected path. Line crews call this the golden rule of the trade, and it is not negotiable regardless of how many customers are waiting.
Who actually does the climbing
A typical storm restoration effort of this size draws on mutual aid, crews and equipment loaned in from utilities in unaffected regions under prearranged agreements that predate any individual storm. Of the roughly ninety linework personnel active during peak restoration, thirty-one were mutual aid crews from three neighboring utilities, coordinated through a regional dispatch framework that assigns visiting crews to specific feeders based on local knowledge provided by the host utility’s own supervisors, since visiting crews don’t know the grid’s layout and can’t safely make sequencing decisions on their own.
The work itself remains largely manual. Bucket trucks and digger derricks handle pole-setting and the heaviest lifting, but final wire connections, transformer work, and fault diagnosis at the pole are done by hand, by linework apprentices and journeymen working in pairs, one on the pole or in the bucket, one grounded, watching. Shifts during active restoration commonly run sixteen hours, capped by federal fatigue rules that mandate rest periods scaled to shift length, rules the utility says it enforces even against pressure from customers and local officials to keep crews working longer.
By the fourth day, the utility’s remaining outages were concentrated in areas requiring full pole replacement rather than reroutes, work Okonkwo’s crew was still finishing a week after the storm passed, long after the news coverage of the event itself had moved on to something else.