Storm Ciarán was no surprise to anyone, Jersey Met had given good warning that we had an extraordinary storm coming and it would hit the Island in the early hours of 2 November.
In preparation for Ciarán’s arrival, incident planning was implemented earlier in the week, which saw all planned work stopped to enable the full deployment of JE’s team of circa 50 front line staff as well as many in support across the group, to respond to the anticipated aftermath of the storm.
Whilst the network performed overall very well, the level of damage caused by falling trees on our Low Voltage Overhead Line network was significant. With the storm still blowing well into the daylight hours of Thursday, the initial phase of our response saw our teams respond to over 200 incidents of damage where the immediate priority was to “make safe” by isolating damaged and downed conductors removing the danger to life. This effort was hampered not only by the weather making working at height difficult, but also limiting access and the ability of JE teams to move round the island due to dozens of blocked roads.
This then was the main focus of our efforts on Thursday but we also managed to restore a smaller number of customers as well.
To put this into context, in an average year, with the usual expected gales, we would normally experience around 50 faults, so this represents more than four times our annual incident rate which occurred in just one night!
Our initial restoration focus has been to address those faults affecting vulnerable customers and this was our priority on Friday. In addition, we have been triaging each incident to assess the scale and type of damage caused to allow the right resources to be deployed with the right equipment. Teams continued to face challenging working conditions during Friday and access to some areas remained a real difficulty, leading to some sites having to be accessed by foot across fields and walls.
In many cases, large trees which brought down our overhead lines needed to be removed to allow supplies to be restored. Some lines and poles required major reconstruction. From the triage process, it became clear that additional resource would be needed, and these were secured with an additional 33 staff sourced from the UK to assist in our restoration efforts. Hampered by ferry disruption from bad weather preventing the Goodwill from docking, the teams from the UK arrived on Saturday evening and are now being safety inducted and already assisting our teams to restore power to remaining customers.
We have continued to refine our restoration plan throughout the incident by assessing the number of customers off supply, as well as the work required to achieve the restoration in order to restore the most customers as quickly as possible. Many customers quite understandably would like to know when their power will be restored. It is difficult to give guidance on this until we have properly assessed the wreckage and in some cases already advanced the repair, safety being paramount throughout. Clearly, this affects when the next repair can be started, and in some cases the ordering of future work.
Where major network damage exists, we are making use of mobile generators and temporary surface laid cable connections to restore supplies as quickly as possible, ahead of major reconstruction work to heavily damaged lines which we will complete in the weeks and months ahead.
We are fortunate that because more than 94% of our Low Voltage Network is underground, 99% of our customers were unaffected by Ciarán’s ferocity. We initially experienced around 800 customers without supply, we have now restored more than 500 customers and our teams are working hard, in quite challenging conditions, to get the remaining customers back up and running.
Thank you for your continued patience and support. Mark Preece
