Story posted Thursday, June 25, 2009
Towns, Power Hit Hard By Booming Storms
By DWIGHT ESAU Journal & Topics Reporter
Not all of the best weather forecasters are on TV.
Many work for Commonwealth Edison, the electric utility company that provides power to residents of the Journal & Topics Newspapers area.
They monitor the weather constantly "with some precision," according to Jeff Burdick, a spokesman for ComEd. He discussed the June 19 storms and the aftermath with this reporter this week.
"When we start seeing signs of an approaching storm front, we start communicating immediately with our crews, and begin gearing up into our emergency services schedule of 16 hours on and eight hours off," he said.
"The two storms on June 19 quickly knocked out power to about 245,000 customers in the Chicago area, a sizable chunk of them in the Northwest suburbs of Arlington Hts., Palatine, Wheeling, and Buffalo Grove. We were out working after the first storm hit late that morning. It took us about 60 hours, or about 2 ½ days, to restore power to all of those customers. Many of them got power back much earlier.
"The storms hit about 10 a.m. on Friday, and we had most of the Arlington Hts.-area customers back on line by Sunday evening, and all of them in the Chicago area were restored by later that same evening," Burdick said.
The storm was the most severe of the spring. Carrying winds of up to 60 miles an hour at times, it uprooted trees and flooded streets and low-lying areas with nearly four inches of rain. Lightning, ComEd's worst enemy in rainstorms, damaged electrical transformers at many locations. Some lightning hit the ground and sent surges of electrical power that damaged underground lines and equipment, Burdick said.
"We had a very wet week preceding the storm," said Andy Radetski, director of public works in Palatine. "We had 3.6 inches of rain on Friday, but we had more than six inches of rain from June 16 through the weekend. It was a very wet period. We had to close four residential streets for a couple of days because of flooding, and had to call out some extra crews to clean up brush and branches blown off trees. There were also many trees that fell on to power lines, knocking them down and cutting power to homes. We had reports of four flooded basements. But the biggest problem in our community was the high number of homes without power. Some of them were dark for more than two days."
"We had to shut down Ironwood Street just off Euclid for a short time on Friday," said Scott Shirley, director of public works in Arlington Hts. "But all other roadways were at least passable, even though some had standing water for a time. We had some relatively minor amounts of brush and branches to clean up, but nothing very serious."
He added that about 2,000 community residences were out of power, but most of them got it back by Saturday, the day after the storms. "We had 3.1 inches of rain on Friday, but we heard that areas just south of us had a lot more," he said.
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