The heavy limb of an ancient-looking tree on a street ironically named Evergreen Place had pulled down a tangle of power and phone lines to a house in Maplewood, where the noisy drone of a generator broke the stillness of the morning.
A block away, another street littered with more tree branches and paved with a carpet of fallen leaves was blocked off with yellow caution tape, while more generators chugged away. Nowhere were there any signs of utility crews.
When Isaias hit Jersey, it wasn’t the rain or storm tides that did the most damage. The high winds accompanying the tropical storm knocked down thousands of trees, taking down power lines up and down the state, leaving well over a million people without power.
As of noon on Wednesday, more than 930,000 people were still in the dark, and state and utility officials had no clear answer as to when the power might be back. At the governor’s daily briefing, officials said they expected 80 percent of customers to have power back by sometime Friday, but the rest could take far longer.
“The legacy of this storm is going to be power outages,” Gov. Phil Murphy acknowledged during his latest coronavirus briefing in Trenton. “This could be a number of days for folks.”
Murphy declined to grade the response of utility companies in the wake of Isaias.
“We’re still in the third quarter of the game,” said the governor, who toured storm damage in a residential neighborhood in Jackson on Wednesday. “We’ll do a postmortem.”
He also said the state is looking into getting federal disaster aid.
However, state Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick, R-Union, called for a special legislative session to find ways to avoid such large-scale power outages.
“There has been much discussion about investment in our power grid infrastructure,” said Bramnick, who is considering running for the Republican nomination to challenge Murphy, a Democrat, in next year’s governor’s race. “It is time to move forward.”
The long and maddening wait for so many utility customers to get their power restored is like a never-ending story in a state with overhead power lines and more than 912 million trees.
Last year, it was a series of powerful thunderstorms that ripped the state, wreaking havoc on New Jersey’s power grid. The previous year, tens of thousands more were without power after a similar line of summertime storms, which had come on the heels of a big nor’easter and then a snowstorm earlier that year, leading the governor to later order a state investigation into how New Jersey utility companies responded to the winter storms.
Assessing the current situation in New Jersey, state Board of Public Utilities President Joseph L. Fiordaliso predicted some who lost power may not be restored until the weekend.
“New Jersey got literally wacked and it really left its mark through the entire state,” the state regulator declared. “The entire state was ravaged.”
One of the reasons for the state’s vulnerability is that so many communities are linked to the grid by overhead wires, and New Jersey itself has many suburban tree-lined streets — often planted with older trees that are often susceptible to heavy winds.
When they come down, they take wires with them.
That takes time to fix. Repairing wires brought down by trees is always a labor-intensive job, say utility officials, who note that fixing one wire brought to the ground by a falling tree limb sometimes only restores service to a single home.
If there are tens of thousands out because service to a home was knocked out by a heavy branch—well, do the math. One crew might be able to restore just one house at a time.
Just clearing the roads of trees to allow repair crews into neighborhoods also has delayed restoration, Fiordaliso said. He added that it was not just the utility distribution systems — the lines that run down streets and carry electricity to homes and businesses — that suffered damage.
“The transmission system has also been damaged considerably,” he said.
SEE WHERE THE POWER IS STILL OUT
Public Service Electric & Gas Co.
Jersey Central Power & Light Co.
Power to New Jersey comes from a mix of generating stations, all connected to a regional power grid — a highly interconnected and intricate network designed to let utilities share electricity and back each other up. They deliver power over high-voltage transmission lines that serve thousands of customers over wide areas. Substations then step down the power from the high-voltage transmission lines, sending it at a lower voltage distribution system into neighborhoods and industrial areas.
Jersey Central Power & Light over the years has been particularly susceptible to outages because there are many trees and wooded areas throughout its service territory, and falling branches are the most common cause for blackouts. It remained the hardest hit utility on Wednesday, with more than half a million of its 1.1 million customers still out of service at noon.
“When we have a storm of this magnitude and winds of this force — when we have those kind of catastrophic effects, the likelihood is that the infrastructure will have damage,” said JCP&L spokesman Cliff Cole. “The goal is to get the service back as quickly as we can.”
He acknowledged the frustration for customers, but said it is often a multi-day process.
The utility, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp in Akron, Ohio, has often come under heat in recent years for its reliance on outside help, its out-of-state management, and questions over its performance.
JCP&L set up staging sites in Jackson Township, Oceanport and Livingston before the storm, and said it also brought in 740 line workers, 725 forestry contractors, 270 hazard responders and 75 damage assessors.
Public Service Electric & Gas Co., which still had nearly 300,000 of its 2.3 million customers out of service at noon, said Isaias may have been among the strongest storms to hit its service territory in recent years, and that some outages could last for an extended period.
“We can’t project restoration times until we have had a chance to assess the damage,” said spokesman Michael Jennings.
Jersey City Power & Light crews in Jackson Township. Ed Murray | NJ Advance Media for
Atlantic City Electric Co., which serves the southern end of the state, reported about 67,900 customers without service into Wednesday afternoon. Spokesman Frank Tedesco said the very high winds with gusts exceeding 65 mph toppled trees and brought down tree limbs that downed power lines and damaged electric equipment. The utility also saw the loss of multiple transmission lines, and was also impacted by winds from a tornado confirmed in portions of Cape May County.
The utility has crews from its sister Exelon company, ComEd in Chicago, assisting its restoration efforts and said it secured additional mutual assistance from companies in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and Canada.
Atlantic Electric said it hopes to restore service for most customers by end of day Thursday, have power back for all customers — including those in the most heavily damaged areas —by Saturday evening.
Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said the constant power outages put people and communities at risk and damage the economy. He called for investments in better technology rather than routing more high-power transmission lines into the state.
“Every time we have a storm, the power goes out. The damage and outages that this tropical storm has caused is a clear-cut example as to why we need to modernize and fix our grid,” he said.
Fiordaliso said the state had been preparing for the worst when Isaias began tracking toward New Jersey.
“Unfortunately, we experienced the worst. Our luck ran out,” he said, noting that at the peak of Superstorm Sandy, which brought historic damage to the state, 2.7 million utility customers were without power.
At the peak of Tuesday’s storm, 1.4 million people were in the dark.
“New Jersey was probably one of the hardest hit states,” the BPU president said.
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Staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL.
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