Electric utilities that spent billions of dollars hardening infrastructure after Superstorm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey in 2012 say those upgrades helped keep the lights on during the Jan. 22-24 blizzard, the Associated Press reported.

Consolidated Edison, which serves 3 million customers in New York City and its northern suburbs, reported that only 4,500 customers lost power. On Long Island, where Atlantic storms have a history of playing havoc with overhead power lines, utility PSEG Long Island reported that fewer than 30,000 of its 1.1 million customers had an outage.

Jersey Power and Light saw 130,000 of its 1.1 million customers lose service, but spokesman Ron Morano told the AP that more than three quarters of those people had service restored within 24 hours. Another New Jersey utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, had only 5,700 total outages, with service restored to most in about one hour.

Utilities and some experts said things could have been a lot worse if the companies that oversee the power grid hadn’t learned such hard lessons during Sandy, when 4 million customers in the two states lost service, the AP reported.

“Certainly all the improvements utilities made post-Sandy; the hardening of infrastructure, the tree trimming, replacement of wires and switches all were really necessary and contributed to keep the outages down,” Meghan McPherson, an emergency management expert who teaches at Adelphi University on Long Island, told the AP.

In addition to installing wider, heavier power poles and more resilient wiring and raising the height of substations vulnerable to flooding, Con Edison spokesman Phillip O’Brien told the AP that his company has installed “smart switches” in many areas. The switches are designed to limit the number of customers who lose service when an individual wire or a pole goes down.

“Because of the smart switch, we had maybe 50 or 70 customers losing power, not 300 or more like we might have had before,” O’Brien said. The company is in the midst of completing a four-year, $1 billion infrastructure undertaken after Sandy, he said.

Upgrades

PSEG Long Island, which took over electric grid operations following scathing criticism of the Long Island Power Authority’s performance in Sandy, is in the midst of a nearly $730 million infrastructure upgrade using part of a $1.4 billion federal hazard mitigation grant, the AP said.

Substations that were flooded in Sandy have been raised higher, stronger poles and wiring were installed in many places. The utility also installed smart switch technology like Con Edison, John O’Connell, the company’s vice president of transmission and distribution, told the AP.

PSEG Long Island has also expanded its tree-trimming efforts to 2,000 miles of wiring annually, up from about 1,800 miles in 2013. Also, trees are being pruned more aggressively with contractors being asked to keep tree branches about 8 feet from wiring on the sides of trees, rather than the previous 6-foot radius, the AP said.

Jersey Central Power & Light has spent more than $2.5 billion in the past decade enhancing its electric system, Morano told the AP. That resulted in an 18% reduction in outages in 2015, with the average outage time running a little over an hour. Morano said the utility trims nearly 3,300 miles of power lines each year.

Also in New Jersey, PSE&G — like PSEG Long Island a subsidiary of the Newark, N.J.-based Public Service Enterprise Group — says it is in the midst of an $11 billion, 5-year capital investment program to upgrade transmission lines. “We are, in effect, rewiring New Jersey,” spokeswoman Karen Johnson, told the AP.

Almost 24 million people throughout the Northeast saw more than 20 inches of snow and 1.5 million got more than 30 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

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Power companies: Post-Sandy reinforcement kept lights on during blizzard

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