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IBEW Members Clean Up
After Isabels Wrath

September 25, 2003

When Hurricane Isabel came riding in on storm-force waves and 100 mile-an-hour winds, IBEW members were at the ready Thursday, September 18 for the inevitable chore of restoring power in her wake.

Modern storm prediction cannot stop a powerful hurricane from striking land, but it can make precise estimates as to the storms path. IBEW members had been assigned to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond and Virginia Beach, Virginia and North Carolina two days before the storm hit the mid-Atlantic. When daylight Friday revealed the scope of the storms damage and the number of people without power stretched over 5 million, the calls went out for more assistance. Coming from places like Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Canada, up to 5,000 IBEW members were still in the Forth District Tuesday morning, said Bryan Stage, IBEW Fourth District outside coordinator.

"Everybody east of the Mississippi, you pick a state and theyre here," Stage said. Of the 5 or 6 million people whose power was cut off by the storm, the majority were in Fourth District states of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., he said. The rest were in North Carolina and eastern New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Since Friday morning, the crews have been working nonstop, said outside lineman Stage, who has spent the past few days with crews restoring power in Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Marylands capital, Annapolis, which suffered both flooding and power outages. Reached by cell phone on Tuesday morning, he was in Richmond, where a tornado had just wiped out power to 40,000 more residents.

By Tuesday, crews had spent the past five days working 16- to 20-hour shifts. "If you are out in the field somewhere, you are not going to walk away from connecting a line to someones house just so you can finish up and get your eight hours rest," Stage said.

"The one sight people want to see when their power it out is a utility crew and Im proud that so many of those crews are IBEW members," said IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill. "Theyve traveled great distances to work long, hard hours and do whatever it takessometimes at great personal riskto get the power flowing back to the public."

Dominion Power Company and Duke Power, two utilities whose service area covers the region smacked by Isabel, stood out as particularly well organized in the chaos of the storms aftermath, said Chris Hill, 10^th District outside coordinator (no relation to President Hill).

Residents in the hurricane-whipped areas have greeted crews with appreciation, bringing them water and food. But the welcoming utility customers are no substitute for a bed, said Chris Hill, who has spent the past few days in North Carolina as part of the districts storm response team, delivering food, coffee, water and soda to line crews. After driving several hours to hard-hit northeastern North Carolina, some crews from South Carolina Electric and Gas had to spend the first couple nights sleeping in their trucks, Hill said. Hotels had no power, and the community center where they were supposed to take shelter was flooded.

"Everybody is exhausted. Everybodys down to their last pair of underwear and their last pair of clean socks," Stage said. "After about five or six days, you see the drain on them."

Photos courtesy of Dominion Power and PEPCO.