Evaluating Irene

The debris has (mostly) been collected, the power restored and the damage compiled. Now, for First Selectman Dan Steward and his team, it's time to reflect.

Steward, along with some of the town’s leaders, has spent the past couple of weeks discussing what was learned from Tropical Storm Irene. Granted, it was not a devastating storm that left people dead (nobody was hurt), essentially just inconvenience cresting into frustration, but it provided a learning experience for when a real catastrophe does happen.

 “I thought the town did a great job,” Steward said. “But are there things we can improve? Of course.”

Steward and his team compiled a list of what it can do better for itself, the state and everybody’s favorite piñata, Connecticut Light & Power. Here is what he came up with:

The Town

“There were lessons learned,” Steward said.

Waterford is the only town in Connecticut with a nuclear power plant, and therefore does more planning for disasters than any other. While a normal town might practice an evacuation or a catastrophe drill twice a decade, Waterford will run drills annually.

On top of that, Waterford Chief of Police Murray Pendleton has held the post for 20 years, one of the longest tenures in the state, and is an expert in emergency management, Steward said. Again, because of Millstone, Pendleton has unique emergency management mandates and training other towns don’t have to worry about, he said.

The biggest problem was people who didn’t realize they were responsible for , forcing the town to take care of them to avoid sewage backups, Steward said in an earlier interview. Also, because of a “personnel issue,” all of the town’s employees could not receive emails on their BlackBerrys the first couple of days on the storm, although that has been addressed, Steward said.

Efficiencies can also be found, such as streamlining some of the debris pick-up at public works, and the town is planning to use social media to communicate with residents better, Steward said. But overall, nearly all the town departments and employees worked long hours and kept themselves safe while handling the storm, Steward said.

“I was happy with how we handled it,” said Steward, who sent out a mass letter to his employees thanking them for the good work.

The State

There were some things the state could have improved, Steward said. First of all, rather than try to get information out through press conferences, conference calls with the municipalities would have been more effective, he said.

The state would try to get out information through the media, so emergency personnel would literally watch the television to get news, Steward said. Just having calls would have been far more effective, he said.

Plus, not all the information the town needed is public information, he said. Sometimes, confidentiality is necessary when dealing with an emergency, he said.

“Sometimes you need information that doesn’t belong in the public eye,” Steward said.

Also, when the conference calls do happen, they should not be “complaint sessions,” Steward said. Some of the calls just had town officials yelling about how poor CL&P was handling everything and that wasn’t productive, he said.

“Those are the kind of calls that drive me nuts,” he said. “Because nothing gets done.”

CL&P

Steward was harshest on Connecticut Light & Power. The company had poor communication with the towns and wasn't nearly efficient as it should have been, he said.

He brought up how a tree was down on , blocking five residences. The town was not allowed to move the tree because it was tangled in down electric wires, so CL&P had to turn the power off before the town could move the tree.

CL&P sent a crew out to look at the tree and then drive back saying it was down, even though the town already knew that, Steward said. Then, despite the town saying it was a major priority, CL&P sent a crew out to a different part of town just to restore power, a lower priority, Steward said.

“What if we had an ambulance call? We couldn’t get to them,” he said. “We were ready, and we were waiting for CL&P. That was wrong.”

Communication issues continued throughout the entire week as power was being restored, Steward said. They were told CL&P would be in one area, and then they would be found in a completely different area of town, he said.

Also, just a cherry on top of the ice cream sundae of confusion, Waterford has had Donna Barber-Dunn as the town’s liaison to CL&P for more than five years, and she was reassigned once Irene started, according to Steward.