What Went Wrong When Irene Hit?

No lights. No television. No telephone. No cell phone. No internet. No text messages.

What happens when violent storms knock out electricity to an entire town, crippling technology and severely limiting communication throughout town?

Branford, along with scores of towns in Connecticut, found out the hard way. Now municipal leaders and state officials are trying to find out when went wrong and how to fix it.

This Monday, Sept. 19, and next Monday, Sept. 26, legislators will hold fact-finding hearings in Hartford to determine the state’s readiness and response.

Branford town and police officials are also putting together “after-action reports” to determine response needs and to make changes in the future.

Although Hurricane Irene lessened to tropical storm status when it hit the state, its winds, rains and storm surge wreaked havoc.

Branford’s 30,000 residents had no electricity, roads were flooded or washed out, homes were damaged, and 155 trees were downed, closing off roads. Power was not completely restored for about a week. Some people had landline phones that worked, and some had cell phones that worked. Most did not.

Officials say one of the major problems resulted from “bundling” all communication services with one carrier.

Town Hall, like many residents in town, had bundled their services through Comcast, meaning they lost phone service and the internet. Although power returned to Town Hall through a generator early in the week, the phones were still out and the server for the town’s Web site was not functional until days later. How to deliver information to residents became issue #1. 

“The power was one thing, the phones were another. The absence of phones made this storm different from others and it was a serious issue,” First Selectman Anthony “Unk” DaRos said in an interview.

For one thing, residents could not charge their cell phones. DaRos put up charging stations at Town Hall after Town Hall’s generator kicked in. People lined up to charge phones in the morning.

“I’ve learned some things from this storm, and we’re working to fix them,” said Peter Hugret, the town’s director of information technology.

“The town’s Web site is Comcast-based and Comcast didn’t come back up until late in the week,” Hugret explained. “We had relied on a single access path to get to the internet. We were disappointed they didn’t get up for so long.”

Since then, Hugret has moved a format of the town’s home page to an outside Web server as a backup. “That will let us get to that page and update it in an emergency,” he explained.

In addition, Hugret said that instead of relying on Comcast exclusively, they are putting in an AT&T DSL (digital subscriber line) as a backup. He said Comcast will be the primary technology provider and the AT&T DSL will be the backup.

Hugret, who has lived in Branford since 1958, said Irene was a more devastating storm than Hurricane Gloria in 1985.  “I haven’t seen the complete town be without power for as long as it was,” he said.

Hugret said the main problem for Town Hall and for many residents was that all their technology was bundled through one provider. “It’s not in the best interest of citizens to have one access path,” said Hugret. The electricity at his own home didn’t return until Friday and his Comcast service was not functional until Saturday. He had no signal for his cell phone at home, but could use it elsewhere where Wi-Fi was available.

Many residents who bundled all digital services with Comcast were stunned to discover that cell phones and internet access disappeared once the electric power went out. That’s because when Comcast bundles the major forms of communication it does so via television access. Without electricity, television and their attachments, including phones and internet, will not work. And that is what residents in town began to understand during the course of one week without power.

Nor was the town’s local cable station operational until late in the week.  Prior to the storm, DaRos spoke on BCTV, the town’s cable access television station, advising residents how to prepare for the storm. But then television coverage for residents went down. During the course of the hurricane week, DaRos addressed residents twice by radio and then daily through a police phone line.  Some radio stations linked with network television news stations to broadcast storm and recovery information. Residents with battery-operated radios were lucky.

“My guess is you’re going to see a lot of people buying battery-operated radios,” Hugret said.

Comcast Failure?

Branford State Rep. Lonnie Reed, vice-chair of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee, said Comcast failed its customers in Branford and elsewhere for nearly a week because “it had no back-up system,” she said in an interview.  The system might last for a number of hours after the power went down, sometimes on a generator, sometimes battery driven for six hours on phone lines, but ultimately customers lost all service.

“What keeps coming back is the total failure of Comcast, at our police station and at town hall and for our residents.” In the aftermath of the hurricane, Town Hall’s telephones, internet and e-mail were all down.  For the first day the police department was without internet service.  “We have Comcast … our window on the world, along with other companies—and they want to control all, to control all our communications: Wi-Fi, telephone, television service,” Reed said.  “So a consumer bundles it all for a cheaper price and then it all goes dead? Well, come on, they ask us to give them all of that and then they are going to fail us?”

“So they did not have any backup system?” the Eagle asked.

“Correct,” Reed said. “They ran out of power and then their backup generator was very, very weak.”

Whether Comcast’s actions rise to the level of an abdication of public responsibility will be discussed at the upcoming legislative hearings. Among the topics to be raised is whether Comcast prepared adequately for the hurricane; and whether unforeseen problems with cell towers, which, it turns out, are dependent upon electricity, should have been predicted beforehand.
 
“It all seems to work seamlessly until you get an event like this and then you begin to see where the flaws are,” said Reed, who has extensive experience in the broadcast industry.

Kristen Roberts, Comcast’s vice-president for community and public relations in Connecticut, said in an interview that once the power went out on television service, customers were stuck.  She said Comcast is not a power company. Comcast wants answers on why Connecticut Light & Power took so long to get the power back on.  She said overall “I think we did a pretty good job keeping our services up and running,” meaning, she said that Comcast Office in Branford and elsewhere were open and running on back-up generators so that customers could conduct business.  Some town officials questioned that.

“Once the television goes out, there is no service.  We began extensive preparations a week before the hurricane; so we were able to minimize certain issues. The vast majority of our customer issues were directly related to the commercial power outages,” Roberts said in an interview.

Asked if Comcast is totally dependent upon commercial power for its existence, Roberts replied this way: “I’m saying if someone has a generator in their home and the generator puts their TV on then most likely they will have cable service. But if a home does not have a TV working then they are not going to have cable.” No cable means no phones or internet.

The Eagle asked Roberts if it was up to the homeowner to have a generator in order to get Comcast. “No,” she replied. “It’s up to homeowner to get their TV on, just as they would put their refrigerator on. We are not a power company. “

Many Comcast seniors in town were stranded in their homes without phone service and in wheelchairs that required batteries be recharged. Some in wheelchairs wound up at the Branford police station where they charged wheelchair batteries. Reed said prolonged outages threatened medical equipment such as respirators.

Roberts said Comcast does “have battery backup in our phones that lasts for about 6 to 8 hours. This was an anomaly… six days without power,” she said.

“Does the company plan to investigate and think about what it might do in the future?” the Eagle asked.  “Hmm. That is something we are diving into, especially with CL&P so that they can restore power sooner,” Roberts said.

There were also issues when it came to cell phones and cell towers.

Some 270 cell towers across the state failed, Reed said. She said cell tower providers needed a much “bigger capacity for fuel to run the generators and for more generators, too. I would say multiple generators. The hope that one lone generator limping along for a day or two for the time they think the electricity will be out is really foolhardy,” she said.

Reed said her approach will be “to get all this information and to figure out how to fix what is broken. And that means sitting down at the table with the stakeholders, including state regulatory agencies.  “They need to open up a docket and look into it. We need to fix this quickly because obviously there will be more storms in the future.”

In most cases, residents who had home phones through a carrier like AT&T were able to use their land lines if they had an “old-fashioned” corded phone. Provided, or course, they were in an area of the state where the telephone poles were not toppled. Officials said that 2,000 telephone poles went down across the state. Portable phones only work when there is electricity to the base. Likewise, laptops powered through AT&T could not be used in powerless communities because WiFi routers require electricity and a phone line.

Although the town was powerless, its leaders were not.

“When you look at the rate of recovery Branford had in comparison to other towns, it was almost embarrassing,” Hugret said, thanks to town leaders, department heads, police and firefighters.

“One of the things Branford has to its benefit is that police, fire, emergency medical services, public works and waste water treatment (departments) work very closely together,” Capt. Geoffrey Morgan, the police department spokesman added. 

“I have been talking to all of our first responders,” Reed said. “Thank God for our people in Branford. Not just the professionals, but the volunteers,  the savvy volunteers who know how to get it fixed and know who the people are in our community who are vulnerable and in need. They knew how to find them and help them.”   

DaRos said that once the phones failed, the town mounted a major effort to communicate with residents the old fashioned way. “We go out there on the streets,” he said. “All our police officers were in uniform, and virtually all were out in the field. They talked to people, they were seen, and they asked people what they needed.”

The Old-Fashioned Way

Police and town officials knew that phone service was compromised for many residents. So they returned to former ways of communication.

The Board of Selectmen hand-delivered typed messages to the 30-members of the Representative Town Meeting, who in turn passed the information to people in their districts.

Police in uniforms distributed flyers with vital information through an army of volunteers including Boy Scouts and volunteer firefighters. Police also went through the neighborhoods

“We sent officers into those areas, we sent fliers into those areas, we made door-to-door contacts,” Capt. Geoffrey Morgan said. “Public information is a priority of this agency and the town…we do it all the time. We train for it all the time.”

“All the family emergency plans and crisis emergency plans should be in place beforehand. We live in very uncertain times.” 

Morgan, the police department’s spokesman, also concurred with others regarding the problems with choosing only one carrier.

“If people had service interruptions, they need to explore it with their carrier,” Morgan said. “Make sure you have more than one contact method or carrier.”

Prior to the storm, the Emergency Operations Center at the police station was already swinging into action. Although the station also lost power, its generator kept the station and the command post functional.

One critical method of communicating with the public is Branford’s “B-Informed,” emergency alert program. Morgan said the system contacts residents through home phones, cell phones, e-mails, text messages and business phones.

The more numbers the resident gives, the easier it is for contact to take place. For example, a person who lived in Branford but worked in New Haven would have received a Branford related hurricane message if B-Informed had a business telephone number. 

Anyone listed in the white pages of the phone book is automatically included in the B-Informed program. Morgan said in the event of a terrorist attack, the police department also has access to unlisted numbers. Residents must “opt in” if they want to be contacted through multiple paths. Click here to do so.

“Almost 2,000 residents have opted in” for additional contacts, Morgan said. “If somebody didn’t get the message…they should take a look at their communication carrier.”’

Police and town officials sent a total of 13 different messages through the course of the tropical storm and its aftermath. DaRos recorded the messages from the police department.       

At the end of his final message to town residents, DaRos ended on a personal note:  “I want to thank the businesses that offered their services during the storm and commend all town departments and citizens for their fine performance at the highest level.”

In the end, it remains to be seen how digital communication will fare in the next hurricane. What many residents in Branford now know is that that old transistor radio they were going to throw out and didn’t was the one tool that worked.  It got them through the crisis and is now a part of their First Aid kit. 

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