Check out my interview with JCP&L

guys um i'm here with two very special people over here that came down all the way from well he came from germany oh it's not not a long commute oh this office is right here in lakewood okay amazing oh here's david he actually coordinated this whole meeting today so david can you introduce two special people to the community so um this is frank and john both are external affairs guys for uh jcp and l the electric company provides electric to our area and um you know the last few weeks we were hit with many power outages and you know i was frustrated and so were you know all my neighbors and friends and uh so i called my good friend frank and uh asked him if they would come out to the community he brought his friend john that does but the ocean county affairs for jcp l to explain for our exactly i can tell you especially me i'm in the real estate industry i brought a lot of people from from the city and they're not used to those blackouts and they always call me like this is the reason why i moved here to have this blackout especially this year when it's more often i don't know what the reason is because i'm sure they have explanation for that but so this is the reason why we came and tried to explain to the community exactly so tell us what what's the real reason why this year we have like thank god it's not long i'm not talking about uh days without electricity but i'm talking about short power outages here and there and you know it's also a little bit frustrating instead of sometimes the middle of the day and it's uh no air conditioning no cooking you know the ovens don't work properly and uh reset the clock every time i missed i missed a few of my meetings already because my alarm clock didn't wake me up in the morning oh my gosh you got to be up before the alarm clock your phone and look i i think david touched on something that was really important and i'm frank luna and this is john mean and when david called and said there were concerns in the community it's really important to jcp l and us personally that we're responsive to folks who have concerns and i think that's why john and i wanted to come by also to get some nice gelato yeah you can always you can always get us out when you offer a meeting at a gelato place so it does help john will chop into some of the recent lakewood outages and uh yeah so let's hear let's what's the reason why this year is more than any other years so so this year specifically uh in the month of july we've been experiencing some severe weather just rolling through the the region um either daily or or every other day just to last night but we had a tornado warning right for our area and watching the radar is coming right at us we've had lightning storms a few times a week and we've had although the wind hasn't been as bad and that's a typical cause for for power outages is wind tree related outages are predominantly the cause of the outages overwhelming yeah yeah it's it's it's and we've come a long way with the tree trimming in the last few years touch on the transmission issues that we had most recently that impacted lakewood in tanzania so one of the largest outages we had last week two weeks ago um in in lakewood here where we had um you know thousands of people out at one time and when you see an outage where you see you know 100 people that's one thing when you see an average of 1200 1500 1800 5000 people it's almost all either substation or transmission related right so we're talking about the bulk power not not the lines in front of your home in a residential area we're talking about the high tension right the lines uh the transmission lines in the cleared field if we take a lightning strike on there or something that creates a voltage issue and we have a trip on that the trip is where the the breaker opens no different than at home uh you have a power strip on your your computer or if there's a voltage of regularity it opens that to protect the equipment our transmission breakers do exactly the same so if we sustain it just on a bigger scale just on a much much bigger scale right and if we have a trip and that breaker opens well everything downstream of there is out of power so i assume there's two reasons why they can trip or it's like a tree fell down nearby it's a fault either way so or it's from the light a lightning strike has been an issue you would never think about that so what happens from when when the power outages what would you recommend people to do the first thing always call always report the outage even if your neighbor reported it you know uh we get that a lot somebody says that my name request street reporter so i don't have to only one time make sure you report once once and only once when when you report the same marriage multiple times it creates a second order and those orders that have to be cleaned up and canceled and unfortunately sometimes the original order can be canceled it just adds confusion during a time where we are all working on the restoration so uh you know to to to help us to get the power back on haul it in immediately and don't continue to call it in you can check our website through your phone or smartphone or yeah i see usually you you you say like approximately a time when it's gonna be turned on and we're working on that our estimated time restoration is frankie sander we call an etr um we're we're working extensively on being able to provide more accurate um atr's what we call a user btr so what happens a little bit behind the scenes as soon as the the custom the customers are calling the people that have don't have hours to call in you rather send on a crew to that specific area which you think that the trip then you just have a cruise we start patrolling right so usually sometimes it takes two hours sometimes you can take overnight well it depends on what what the issue is right so let's say for instance in the storms we've had um we've had a lot of say of outages and there were large larger number outages but duration hasn't been as bad i think you touched on that and that's because we've experienced a lot of trips so in a trip there could be one repair uh if a repair um and then just patrolling it making sure everything's good before you heat it back up and close but if it involves a tree tree full or whatever that's when it comes more complicated it becomes very complicated especially when you add wind right when we have a wind event along with the lightning we have tree limbs trees coming down taking poles down multiple poles down well you can have a pole come down it could be affecting 100 customers or 100 homes say and it could take us four six eight hours depending on the conditions we didn't go down and you have to pick up the pole and because everything sometimes we can't even get our workers up in the air in a truck if the wind is 35 miles an hour what happens if it's happening what's it one o'clock at night you have cruise all night all day we'll call more more crews in before that there's a call-out process um so you have people are working 24 hours a day as well yeah they're on christmas yeah i mean for us you know christmas last year was so it's definitely something that you are on top of it and trying to do everything to make sure that um to be to be restored as soon as possible so so imagine this so you're in real estate right so our business is electric utility we don't generate we just distribute right so no we deliver the energy um during a power outage when you have thousands of of residents out especially during the summer months where where the usage is high air conditioning and such when you have a a percentage of your market share i'm no longer using your product because there's an outage it's in your best interest to get that power back on as quickly as possible absolutely so it's not just i mean it's obviously it's something we want to do to get everybody back in their safety issues concerned just traffic lights are out there people would manage general welfare yeah health and happiness but we often get comments from people and i know they're just venting but they'll say something to the effect of well you guys are just a big electric company you really don't care about the the people you don't care if our power quest back on i mean it doesn't look like saying you don't care about selling right you do and that's why you you you put as much effort into exactly this is what i mean you came down all the way here to lakewood to show us uh that's good dave if david asks us to go somewhere he's a buddy r so we gotta make sure you know we but and that's important to the company it's very important to our company that customers throughout the entire region feel that we're responsive and coming down and sitting and talking with you guys is going to reach thousands of folks and let them know like hey we're here we're in the community we care about the concerns we want to keep people's power on you know david and i are in general now let me ask you a question it's probably i know the answer about maybe you can explain it better why in this city you don't see that much uh power outages because the y is underneath so why maybe maybe you should start doing that putting the wires underneath there have been studies on this and and there's um there's a massive massive cost to underground um i mean most new developments that i sell guys it's that state law it's been like that for decades so any new development underground but they're still being fed overhead right so you can't say well hey you know we're an underground development so we don't have to worry about wednesday actually we shouldn't put it on the ground we read it for the aeriv now but think about this in brooklyn you have how many square how many mileage of of lines of you know of wires do you have for how many people over here you you're talking about a much greater area and less people populated less much less densely populated over here than brooklyn so over there here because you're at the jersey shore you get a beach i mean john can you touch on the comparison of why this year was more than than say like yeah the comparison with north jersey in 2018 yeah july july is july is it you know it is hurricane season officially but you know typically we don't see hurricanes this time of year they're just the severe uh thunder lightning wind storms and it's continuous you know july in new jersey is is about as close to florida as you're going to get it's going to rain just about every day for a little while what's this year's this year was a heavier uh well here i'm sure if you do a study throughout the entire state the averages you know it may be the same but where we are you know this is where we're getting hit with these lightning storms uh more so in central than up in north jersey it's it's just uh you know the cycle i don't know a few years ago it was just the opposite just the opposite you know you just can't control the weather can't control the weather if we could you know i would i would pick a day like this if anybody can see from here that's why we came we were told you guys could control the weather but and the gelato and the gelato right right right we're um we're involved with it we're embedded in the community right and you could say uh you know i've been here in lakewood for six years uh since i started with the company my office is right here in lakewood it's uh there's a learning curve uh within the electric utility and also within the communities that we have you know for instance if you serve a community like i do here in lakewood and also serve one of let's say a shore community in monmouth county uh there's a vast difference in in everything right equipment the the amount of people we have how we serve um where where the lines are there's quite a bit involved so you have to have an intimate knowledge of not just the your community but the people all right guys um what's a pleasure meeting you and i'm really thankful for