The Public Utilities Commission will look into how the state’s power companies responded to last weekend’s record-breaking snowstorm.

If last weekend’s storm was a test, it appears Unitil passed. This time around, it may be Public Service of New Hampshire that gets the most scrutiny.

Of the 202 calls the PUC received last week about storm-related problems, 173 were about PSNH, according to Amanda Noonan, director of the consumer affairs division. Ten were about Unitil and four about National Grid, she said; the rest were about other utilities or general questions.

Tom Frantz, director of the PUC’s electric division, said it’s too soon to say whether his agency will conduct the kind of “after action review” it did after a devastating ice storm hit New Hampshire in December 2008.

However, Frantz said: “It’s a huge storm, and it’s impacted a large part of the state.

So after power is fully restored, he said, “we’ll look at the outage, we’ll look at the calls we got, we’ll look at the crews that came in, the timing, and we’ll determine what the appropriate next steps are.”

The storm that Public Service of New Hampshire labeled “Snowtober” ranks as the third-worst power outage in the state’s history, affecting an estimated 338,000 customers.

A wind storm in February of 2010 left 378,000 without power. And the 2008 ice storm affected more than 432,000 customers in 211 communities, some for as long as two weeks, according to a PUC review released Dec. 3, 2009.

In that report, the regulators singled out Unitil’s response to the storm, stating that its emergency response plan “was inadequate for the severity of the ice storm and the amount of damage experienced.”

However, the PUC noted that after that storm, Unitil “recognized the substantial shortcomings of that plan and completely rewrote it to ... adopt procedures adequate for handling a large-scale emergency.”

Snowfall predictions

Mike Skelton, PSNH spokesman, said the amount of snow that fell took everyone by surprise. “It ultimately ended up being more intense than was forecasted.

“We knew we were going to respond to an event,” he said, “but the full scope of the event did not become apparent until obviously storm conditions subside and you reach your peak outage figure and you understand just how big of a storm this was.”

PSNH had put out an advisory to all staff and facilities by mid-afternoon that Friday, Oct. 28, Skelton said, and contacted medical emergency customers to warn of potential outages.

On Saturday afternoon, with the National Weather Service predicting heavy, wet snow and widespread power outages, PSNH opened its emergency operations center in Manchester and sent service crews out to its 14 work centers across the state.

Outage reports began Saturday evening, and by 7 a.m. Sunday, “we understood the scope of the storm at that point and what it was going to take to respond to it,” Skelton said. The company issued a statement warning it could take up to a week before power would be restored to all customers.

Sunday morning, 25 crews from HydroQuebec began arriving to supplement PSNH’s own 100 crews. By that afternoon, 237,000 PSNH customers were without power and the restoration began in earnest, Skelton said.

The PUC’s Frantz said after the 2008 storm, Unitil implemented changes that seem to have paid off in this latest storm. “And we’ve seen that before from them, in the wind storm and certainly in Tropical Storm Irene, that they took to heart the lessons of the 2008 ice storm,” he said.

Different forecast

By Friday morning, most forecasters were still calling for 2 to 5 inches of snow for the state. But Alec O’Meara, media relations manager for Unitil, said the company’s forecasters saw something different.

“We saw the forecast change early Friday morning, about a day and a half before the storm hit,” he said. “We immediately began securing additional resources.

“We were very, very concerned about the consistency of the snow and the volume of the snow that was going to fall.”

Part of the concern, he said, was due to a dusting of snow that had fallen in the Plaistow area that Thursday. “Just that little bit of snow, we had about 4,000 people out overnight,” O’Meara said. And that, he said, “was probably in our minds as we were preparing on Friday.”

Early Friday response

So starting early that Friday, Unitil lined up 300 bucket truck, “wires-down” and tree crews from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Canada to augment local crews.

“We had about 1,000 people, Unitil and non-Unitil, on hand to respond to this particular event,” O’Meara said. “We expected hurricane-like damage, and that’s exactly what we saw.”

The first out-of-state crews started arriving on Saturday; by sun-up Sunday, O’Meara said, “We had 70,000 of our 100,000 customers without power.”

But because of Unitil’s preparations, he said, “we had 99 percent of our customers back up by the end of the day Tuesday, and we were clear in New Hampshire by mid-morning Wednesday.”

As of 6 a.m. Wednesday, there were still 85,000 PSNH customers in the dark.

Crews from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Missouri and Tennessee were arriving in waves. By noon Wednesday, PSNH had 312 crews restoring distribution circuits, as well as 150 tree-trimming crews, according to the PUC.

PSNH opened additional work centers in Amherst and Hudson for crews to operate from. By Thursday, 500 crews were here repairing power lines and cutting trees.

The storm damage knocked out 93 out of 178 electric circuits, a record number, Skelton said. In comparison, the 2010 ice storm took out 41 circuits.

PSNH identified some 2,300 “trouble spots” involving poles, wires or transformers, he said. That doesn’t even count problems with power lines to individual houses.

Tree problem

PSNH spends $14 million a year on tree-trimming, Skelton said. But in this storm, much of the damage came from outside “trim zones,” as trees and limbs bent and broke under the weight of the heavy snow and their own foliage.

Another problem was the storm’s reach, Skelton said: “At its peak, you had over 3 million people out across the Northeast.” And that meant calling in crews from farther away, which delayed their arrival, he said.

Skelton said given how severe the storm was and how much damage it caused to infrastructure, PSNH crews restored service as quickly as possible. Getting power back to more than 230,000 customers in five days, he said, “is a significant achievement.”

Jim Bakas, vice president of operations and engineering at New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, said the Co-op called crews from North Carolina on Sunday to come help out here. In the end, however, they didn’t need them.

By Tuesday afternoon, all 13,000 NHEC customers had it back. So, Bakas said, “those crews that were en route, we diverted them” to municipal power companies in Massachusetts.

They also released local contract crews to help PSNH.

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