Ice storm anniversary: BWL faces change and concern
LANSING – For retiree Flo Baerren, the December 2013 ice storm created physical, emotional and financial hardship.
The memories of going without power for more than a week while driving between her cold, dark, south Lansing home and a motel room in Jackson remain a "raw wound," Baerren, 69, said Monday.
The arrival of winter and the one-year anniversary of her loss of power have left her scared — and rekindled her anger.
"I don't blame the ice storm on the Board of Water & Light," she said. "I do blame them for their lack of response, their unpreparedness and the fact they didn't have a plan for this type of emergency."
BWL's failures in preparation and response are not merely the opinion of angry customers.
State regulators and citizen watchdogs verified the city-owned utility did not plan for an outage that could affect more than 20 percent of its customers because 20 percent was the biggest loss it had ever experienced — until December 2013, when 40 percent of BWL's 96,000 customers lost power for up to 11 days.
"We live in Michigan for Pete's sake and you're not prepared for something like that?" Baerren said.
The past 12 months have witnessed internal and outside investigations of BWL, operational changes and voter approval to add three non-voting board seats representing suburban customers. Despite assurances the mistakes won't be repeated, doubts linger.
Retired National Guard Brig. Gen. Mike McDaniel, who led the community investigation into BWL's handling of the storm, and Mayor Virg Bernero, who authorized the study, share Baerren's consternation.
"My God, it's why you do planning," McDaniel said. "Your worst case to date is too limiting. Within the BWL service area you have to plan and say, 'what's the worst-case scenario?'"
Bernero said he still doesn't understand BWL's lack of preparation and its flawed response.
"The compilation of errors and failures that took place is beyond reasonable to me," he said Monday. "You can have a catastrophic failure of one thing, but to have so many things go wrong is just too great a coincidence.
"That leads to questions about the planning and management and so on."
Could the answers to those long-simmering questions lead to the accountability many outage survivors say has been lacking?
"As to the future and accountability, the board needs to look very carefully and seriously at that, about leadership and stewardship going into the future," Bernero said.
"I would say stay tuned."
Victim of weather?
As early as Dec. 30, 2013 — before the full restoration of power — J. Peter Lark, the city-owned utility's leader since 2007, had begun to cast BWL as a victim of weather circumstances beyond its control.
"There is almost no context within which to place the BWL's loss of 40 percent of our customers," he told the Lansing City Council during a hastily convened special meeting at which BWL customers vented for more than an hour. "Some are calling it the storm of the century. … No utility in Michigan has ever lost 40 percent of its customers."
He ordered an internal, top-to-bottom review to assess BWL's performance. Released on Feb. 18, the review said "BWL operations staff … could not anticipate the unprecedented damage" the storm would cause.
The use of "could not" as opposed to "failed to" was a sticking point within the community until McDaniel's Community Review Team and the Michigan Public Service Commission reported the findings of their reviews.
•BWL did not understand its role in assuring regional health, safety and welfare.
•BWL did not have a comprehensive emergency operations plan or an emergency manager or a distinct emergency operations center when the storm struck.
•The outage lasted two to three days longer than it should have because BWL had failed to follow its tree-trimming policy, lacked trained damage assessors for immediate deployment, did not have sufficient mutual aid agreements and because its outage management system failed to work.
•Communications failed between BWL and the local governments and between BWL and its customers.
As for BWL's internal review, the CRT found those recommendations ambiguous and too loosely framed to be meaningful. "Accomplishment of the goals can be declared by BWL without real and needed change being effected," the CRT said.
On May 30, the staff and chairman of the MPSC affirmed every finding and recommendation of the CRT, saying the citizens' panel "showed great wisdom and professionalism in its difficult task."
BWL's management and commissioners had fallen short in their duty to be prepared for extreme weather events, the regulatory agency concluded.
The CRT report also said BWL's structure and culture "make reform difficult, if not impossible, from within."
Lark quickly expressed disagreement with that finding. McDaniel now says the CRT comment wasn't meant as harsh criticism. "It was meant as you can't do it by yourself ," he said. "I have the sense the corporate culture is starting to change."
Lark stands firm
Despite independent conclusions that BWL failed to take prudent steps in handling the storm, Lark stood firm in a Dec. 11 interview.
"Best practices require a utility to look with a historical perspective at what has happened over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years and to be prepared for that," Lark said.
If Lark ever believed BWL was unable to plan for the storm or that it was a victim of circumstances beyond its control, "I hope he has changed his mindset, philosophy and response since then," McDaniel said.
"Do you think Mayor (Ray) Nagin got a pass?" when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, McDaniel asked. "Of course not. Neither does the mayor or general manager of Lansing and the BWL."
Lark said financial considerations also influenced BWL's lack of preparedness. "Everything we do costs money (and is) paid for by our customers," he said. "All decisions have financial ramifications on our customers."
BWL's internal report described the restoration effort as "neither better nor worse than other similar restoration efforts based on national data." Going forward, that won't be good enough, the utility said, promising to be better than average.
A majority of BWL's eight commissioners accepted the report at face value. Two voiced concern.
The report appeared to be something less than the "top-to-bottom review" Lark had promised, said Commissioner Cynthia Ward. Dennis Louney, then the co-chair of BWL's Board of Commissioners, said the report lacked an analysis of management's actions.
In the Dec. 11 interview, the State Journal asked Lark why he hadn't demanded a more substantive internal review.
"I demanded a very complete, substantive review of the storm," he said. "I think I got a substantive review of the storm.
"I don't believe the CRT indicated our review was not a good review, but they came it at from a different perspective."
Circling the wagons
Over the past 12 months, Lark has apologized frequently — including for traveling to New York City for a brief Christmas vacation less than 48 hours after the storm struck.
His apology for that trip did not occur until eight days after his return to Lansing and only after he became aware the State Journal was going to report on the trip.
"We are going to dig in and get to the bottom of what went right and what went wrong," Bernero said a few days after the apology. "I think Peter and the board are well aware that the eyes of the community are on them."
Over the past 12 months, however, BWL's Board of Commissioners often has seemed protective of Lark and defensive about the ice-storm failures.
"The response and attitude was a circling of the wagons when the storm first happened — protect the organization from outside attacks," said Ken Fletcher, supervisor of Delta Township, home to BWL's second-biggest customer base of 12,405 households.
"We have complete confidence that Peter and the rest of the staff ... have done what they could to make sure that this city was safe and got the service back up," Sandra Zerkle, the board's longest-serving commissioner, said last Dec. 30, before service was fully restored and before the reviews had started.
Asked if some commissioners expressed hope the uproar would blow over, Louney said yes. "There were several board members who had not been in a crisis situation like this," he said. "It was a learning process for everyone."
Baerren, the south Lansing customer, wants more from the board. "I think the entire board should be discharged and people who know something about running a utility should be appointed."
A 'commendable' performance
In June, the State Journal reported that Lark had awarded himself the highest possible rating in every category of job performance in his annual self-review.
BWL commissioners rated his annual job performance as "commendable." In July, they reappointed him for another year, with only Ward dissenting.
Some board actions accentuated a coziness that long has existed between members of the unpaid, politically appointed, part-time board and Lark, a lawyer and former MPSC chairman who serves as BWL's general manager.
Until the fallout from the ice-storm outage, the board's membership was transparently deferential to Lark — so much so that he saw no need to inform them a state investigation into a $23 million chemical accident at a BWL water treatment plant produced 10 workplace safety violations and $13,700 in fines.
Louney called that omission part of a pattern of withholding information from commissioners. Three months later, Ward and Louney were passed over for the top leadership roles by other board members.
"The CRT called for a more assertive board," Ward told the LSJ last week. "In my opinion, it will take a voting majority of (the eight voting) commissioners to be assertive to actualize a real difference. One or two can't go it alone."
Lark said he doesn't steer the commissioners. "I don't think I've been leading them," he said. "I'm involved in keeping them informed to what is going on."
A painful lesson
After a year of controversy, Lark prefers to look ahead. "I think it's important you and your readers know the BWL is a different entity than it was a year ago," he said.
The CRT and MPSC combined to make more than 100 recommendations. Lark said 80 percent have been implemented.
BWL has repaired and stress-tested its outage management system, expanded mutual aid agreements and tree-trimming, developed a crisis communications plan, added an interactive outage map and new ways to report outages, hired an emergency operations manager and more, he said.
"Gen. McDaniel made a good point," Lark said. "Weather patterns are different now than a decade or two ago. … We've learned a painful lesson. We are much better prepared to meet the challenges that will confront us in the future.
"We are spending more money today than in the past and will continue to spend more than that tomorrow to make sure the system is more robust and better able to handle what nature throws our way.
"This has been very challenging year for us and I'm heartened that I had a role in making the BWL a stronger utility."
BWL vs. Consumers Energy
The December 2013 ice storm affected U.S. residents from Kansas to New England and people in six Canadian provinces.
In Michigan, the Public Service Commission estimated the storm affected 600,000 customers of DTE and Consumers Energy.
As the state regulator of DTE and Consumers, the MPSC required those utilities to explain their preparation for and response to the ice storm. Their showings weren't flawless and the commission required them to make changes to ensure a better future result. But the commission reached this overall conclusion:
"Both Consumers Energy and DTE Electric had emergency management procedures in place and responded effectively and safely to the ice storm event to address the outages."
When compared to BWL, Consumers Energy restored power to almost twice as many customers in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties and finished three days sooner than BWL, the State Journal found in a review of MPSC records.
BWL completed power restoration to an estimated 38,582 customers on Jan. 1, compared with Consumers' Dec. 29 completion of restoration to an estimated 71,300 customers in the three-county area — and another 317,000 statewide.