JEA post-Irma: Improvements since Matthew, but “lessons to be learned”

Jacksonville, FL — “This wasn’t the last hurricane we’re going to have impact our service area, so let’s learn from this.”

It’s the message from JEA Board Chair Alan Howard, after hearing from the CEO, CFO, and several other company officials involved in the utility’s response to Hurricane Irma. While, by and large, JEA officials seemed to approve of how they prepared, how their systems maintained, and how they ultimately responded to the storm, there was a clear tone set at the start of the Board meeting.

"Understand why information was coming in that wasn't accurate and why customers didn't get accurate feedback, so we can correct that as we go forward," says Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry.

Curry had the City start an outage reporting page in the aftermath of Irma, amid some complaints from customers who said the JEA outage map wasn't matching up or who were frustrated they weren't getting specific timelines for when their power would get back on. After JEA restored priority power, they moved to a more surgical approach that did involve proactively notifying customers as they were working on that customer's circuit, but that approach didn't start until a few days after the storm.

JEA’s Board Chair said those would be issues they directly confront in the aftermath of this storm, among other things.

“There are things that we can improve on here, there are lessons to be learned, additional steps that we can take to reduce the impact to our customers the next time this happens,” Howard says.

JEA says their water system performed remarkably well- with only a few small boil water advisories issued, affecting fewer than 2,000 customers. While there were Sanitary Sewer Overflows- or SSOs- during Irma, there was much less released overall than what we saw during Hurricane Matthew. In terms of the electric system, JEA says there was minimal damage from wind and water- which speaks to how they have hardened the system.

CEO Paul McElroy says one of their strengths was calling in about 350 mutual aid workers- both linemen and tree workers- ahead of the storm, staging them so they would be ready to quickly respond. While they brought in even more resources after the storm, he says it was crucial they had their plan in place, because of the resources that were being tapped by other states and other parts of Florida.

“The national infrastructure- and I do mean national infrastructure- for restoration was stressed,” McElroy says.

JEA’s own infrastructure was not immune from the storm- they lost use of their main tower because part of the roof was taken off by Irma, although they maintained their communication infrastructure and IT. In all, JEA CFO Melissa Dykes says they suffered about $30 million in damage to their systems- which is about $10 million more than Matthew. She says they expect to be reimbursed for the “vast majority” of that, noting that the net out of pocket for Matthew was around $2 million.

JEA expects there to be discussion after the storm about moving power lines underground and other steps that could further harden the system, but they noted that solution specifically is costly. They were able to get the entire electric system assessed within the first 24 hours, including using new drones and a helicopter to conduct damage surveys. The biggest problem for the electric system remains the tree canopy.

“Let’s continue to harden those systems and look at ways to reduce the SSOs next time, reduce the tree limbs down. There’s just room for growth and improvement,” Howard says.

The Board further asked JEA to provide a comparison of how they performed compared to the rest of the state. McElroy believes that will show they stood up to the test.