"We need to make sure we
have enough people to keep the lights on in New
Jersey," said Karen Johnson, spokeswoman for
Public Service Electric & Gas, New Jersey's
largest utility.Twenty Massachusetts workers
from Boston-based NSTAR planned to drive south
Wednesday to Birmingham, Ala., in response to a
request for help from Alabama Power Co.
The full extent of the damage wasn't yet known.
Flooding kept crews from getting to some areas.
The floodwaters will need to be drained before
power crews can start to work.
"We're so early in the storm ... that the
hometown companies only themselves are in the
early stages of identifying where the damage is,"
Owen said.
The utilities that need help pay the bill.
In disasters, utilities concentrate first on
repairing transmission lines and substations. Then
crews restore power to police and fire stations,
hospitals, sewage pumping stations and shelters
before moving on to the areas where power can be
restored to the largest number of people in the
shortest time.
The tradition of utilities helping each other
during major outages dates back decades. Utilities
in the South, for example, sent workers to Ohio to
restore electricity in December when an ice storm
knocked out power to 275,000 homes for a week or
longer.
---
Associated Press Writers Jeffrey Gold in
Newark, N.J., Estes Thompson in Raleigh, N.C.,
Jeff Price in Miami and Michael Felberbaum in
Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
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