Storm could leave 10 million without power

Oct 30 - USA TODAY

The brutal force and enormous breadth of Hurricane Sandy may leave as many as 10 million people in the dark from West Virginia to Maine and even as far west as Chicago.

Thousands of residents in New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland had already experienced power outages by late Sunday, but utility workers were rushing to restore electricity to many before Sandy's strongest wind gusts started slamming the region Monday afternoon.

"We're actively responding to outages as they occur," says David Botkins, director of media relations for Dominion Virginia Power. "We have to be very careful about putting people in harm's way, but so far we've been able to work through it."

The worst is yet to come, and utility companies have been preparing for outages of historic magnitude. Thousands of line workers and support crews are on their way from as far as California and Texas, and many already are in staging areas prepared to respond.

The 2003 Northeast blackout spread through eight states and affected more than 50 million people but was not caused by a storm and did not involve downed power lines, broken trees and flooding. It lasted less than 24 hours for most people. Hurricane Sandy's impact is expected to linger for days.

Using a computer model, a Johns Hopkins University engineer predicts that 3 million will lose power in New Jersey alone.

Seth Guikema, assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins, says that southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey will be hit the hardest, throwing almost 8 million people in the dark. His computer model, which uses outage data from 11 hurricanes, shows power will be out also in Washington, D.C. (200,000) and Delaware (400,000). Other states that will be affected include Virginia, New York and Connecticut. "We're not trying to estimate the duration of power outages," Guikema says, "but it's going to be very long duration outages."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported that some nuclear power reactors in Sandy's projected path had been closed for maintenance and others may be required to close. The agency dispatched inspectors to each facility ahead of the storm to make sure procedures were in place to assure safety.

Federal rules require that nuclear plants be shut down before any projected hurricane-force winds. Because reactors continue to generate heat well after fission has stopped, specially protected backup generators are required to ensure that cooling systems can continue to operate if there is a flood or loss of power.

"All plants (in Sandy's path) have flood protection above the predicted storm surge," the NRC said in a statement, "and key components and systems are housed in watertight buildings capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds and flooding."

Pepco, which serves Washington, D.C., and Maryland suburbs, earlier had asked utilities in other states to send about 3,000 people to pitch in. The company increased the request to 3,600.

Baltimore Gas and Electric has set up staging areas to accommodate 3,000 out-of-state workers coming from as far as New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana. About 5,000 of its customers were without electricity as of midday Monday.

"It's changing by the quarter-hour," says Keith Voight, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the association of shareholder-owned electric companies that generate 75% of the power in the USA. "Forecasters predicted it could become the worst storm to hit the East Coast in 100 years."

About 7 million were in the dark when Hurricane Irene hit last year and 5 million after a "derecho" storm took the Washington area by surprise in June.

Even Chicago -- about 800 miles inland from the Atlantic -- may feel Sandy's impact. "We're actually preparing right now because we're expecting high winds and high waves on Lake Michigan," says John Schoen of ComEd, which provides power to the Chicago area.

Contributing: Peter Eisler