Iberdrola USA subsidiary Central Maine Power (CMP) utilizes a Storm Clearinghouse that arranges for meals, lodging, equipment delivery and a broad range of other services to meet the needs of the company and its employees during recovery from a major storm. The tasks — which are both numerous and diverse — can be difficult to accomplish in the best of circumstances. Add a major holiday to the mix, and it’s even more challenging. How do I know this? During a storm, running the Storm Clearinghouse is my responsibility.
When the Christmas week ice storm caused more than 125,000 of CMP’s customers to lose power, we needed to be extra creative in order to feed hundreds of workers on days when nearly every restaurant and grocery store in our service area was closed. In the end, we got great support from the business community and that made all the difference.
During a major storm, lunch generally involves bag lunches for crews in the field, and dinners are often served in the evening before crews are released for their rest period. It looked like this might not be an option with everything closed for the holiday, but a few phone calls changed all that.
Steve Daniels, a manager in CMP’s Marketing & Sales department, called the facilities director for the local Hannaford supermarkets and pleaded him to open up just long enough for us to buy groceries to make up bag lunches. Then I called the owner of the Senator Inn in Augusta to see if the chef would consider opening up on Christmas night and serving dinner to crews that were working in the area. Roger, chef at The Senator Inn, wondered how at 8:30 on Christmas Eve he could possibly acquire enough meat to feed 750 hungry men Christmas dinner. Thankfully Jeff Ballard, vice president of Operations Technology and Business Transformation at Iberdrola USA, had a solution. His family owns a local meat market, so he arranged with Roger to supply the meat needed for the Christmas evening meal.
Roger was also worried about having enough staff to help him out. I told him we had employees ready to help clear tables and perform other tasks that needed to be done, and we struck a deal.
A short time later, while Roger and CMP employees were shopping at Hannaford’s (a local supermarket chain) for lunch and dinner supplies, I asked if he could also serve a breakfast buffet the day after Christmas, and he agreed. The Senator Inn served an exceptional Christmas dinner to more than 750 workers, and then more than 500 line and tree workers enjoyed breakfast the next morning.
Meanwhile, a group of employees gathered in our General Office Auditorium in Augusta, Maine, and with the supplies purchased from Hannaford, made more than 4,000 bag lunches over two days.
Feeding crews in coastal parts of our service area had its own challenges. Rich Hevey of Legal, Kevin Howes – Key Accounts manager, and Debbie Mills of Regulatory & Tariffs picked up catering from one of the few local restaurants that was open and planned to deliver the goods in three vehicles to Belfast, Maine. Along the way, the snow covered roads proved too much for many motorists. With traffic tied up and no way to get around, Debbie called upon the state police to provide an escort for their motorcade into Belfast.
More food runs were made to dozens of convenience stores and service stations across parts of ice-encrusted central Maine, all in an effort to keep crews fed.
The many employees who support the Storm Clearinghouse deserve lots of credit. Regardless of the task, people stepped outside their normal roles to help out in any way they could. There was a lot of on-the-job training, and many of us performed new tasks for the very first time. And everyone put their family holiday plans on hold — a tremendous sacrifice for which I’m very grateful.
Most importantly, when I step back and think about the week, I realize that our employee connections to the community enabled us to come together and provide for the basic needs of the crews, which in turn enabled them to focus on their job — safely getting power on for our customers.
