Planning focus and public fear

After Fukushima, power plants and vertical utilities---especially nuclear ones---can’t catch a break.

Despite fervent planning and detailed execution, the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant is still caught in the “we’re not them” excuse cycle this week. They get to bail out public perception while they bail out river water.

Disaster planning has long been a staple of utility emergency procedures, but a string of storms, flooding, tornadoes and other bits of weather nastiness have the American public wondering if the industry is doing enough to prevent injuries, deaths and outages. But, can a utility really do more than plan for established scenarios? Should they be expected to anticipate every possible bad decision and each hearty gust of wind?

Returning to Nebraska and Fort Calhoun, the employees there tried diligently to ward off Japanese comparisons by opening their flooded power plant to journalists. CNN reported this week that they were allowed inside access. Plus, the CEO of Fort Calhoun pointed out, through a lengthy quote in the CNN article, that no flood water had breached the reactor, that the reactor itself was covered with borated water as it should be.

Now, the close time-proximity to Fukushima’s disaster, of course, played a large part in how quickly and how carefully Fort Calhoun had to react to public fears. But Calhoun isn’t the only utility under pressure to show their disaster planning hand to the American public today. There was also a series of small town newspaper reports this week on the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its recovery from the April storms that knocked out power in the South.

Apparently, this series of stories was sparked by one Republican representative from the state of Maryland making a remark that the blackouts from those April storms showed the power grid as vulnerable. In fact, he’s quoted repeatedly in those stories as saying the grid is “very much on edge.”

This prompted a quick response from TVA. The bottom line of all responses was this: You can’t accurately predict or prevent weather damage completely, and no power grid can be made immune to weather. Having poles in the sky makes one at the mercy of the wind. That’s pretty much a fact of our grid structure. But, the key isn’t shoring up beforehand, it’s following up quickly.

In fact, most disaster planning---like TVA’s stellar storm clean-up work---is about response rather than prevention. Perhaps that representative thought that the days some people went without power in the region was an excessive outcome of the storms. But, weather predictions will have to get much more accurate, and we’d have to spend a lot more money on undergrounding miles and miles of line, in order to even begin a prevention program. And, if fear wasn’t the background of that vulnerability statement, the expense of this request would, normally, curb a political response in these times of recession. After all, a prevention program to ward off Mother Nature that would cost the taxpayers billions goes against the anti-spending rallying cry.

Still, even with events that are unpredictable or unthinkable, the American public expects utilities to have not just prevention options but detailed contingency plans. Take the recent lawsuit against Xcel Energy over the unfortunate accidental deaths of five contract workers at their plant in 2007. A fire killed men brought in from a coating company in California to paint a penstock. The fire blocked the only escape route, and, despite attempts at dropping rescue equipment and plans to pull the workers out from above, the men perished.

Xcel said that the responsibility lied with the contractor and the men involved. (Apparently, there was a mistake made onsite with chemical mixing that ignited the fire.) But, federal prosecutors blamed Xcel and took them to court for violating safety regulations.

Xcel was found innocent this week, but a legal ruling doesn’t often change public perception. And the question of whether those men could have been saved by a better disaster plan on the part of Xcel will likely haunt the company and the families of those men---just as the disaster unraveling Fukushima will continue to plague every nuclear plant around the world with as much as a minor case of the hiccups and the idea of stronger infrastructure will follow every storm-related power outage.

Utilities will always be planning for disasters, but the American public will always expect improvements in that planning---adjustments, changes, investments, upgrades. And the two will likely never meet in a central, agreed upon spot. Utilities are thinking from both a community and a business perspective; the public is thinking from an individual protection perspective. And, unfortunately, the end result will likely never make either camp completely happy. But, we keep striving for a balance. That’s about all we can do, really, besides hoping that the weather quiet down a bit and that no one ever makes a mistake again.

But, the planning is all we have any actual control over. Human nature and Mother Nature cannot be adjusted to suit our desires, unfortunately.