LANSING — Gen.Mike McDaniel woke up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday to discover a tree had caught fire in his backyard.
A downed power line set the tree ablaze and knocked out electricity to McDaniel's East Lansing home for five days in 2013.
McDaniel was lucky. Some people were without power for as long as 11daysafter an historic ice storm walloped the regionon Dec. 22 and 23.
More than 38,500area residents lost power at some point— a record 40% of the customers served by the Lansing Board of Water & Light, a city-owned utility.
More:A cold dark, Christmas: Residents remember Lansing's 2013 ice storm
'I will always remember'
The historic storm left exploded circuits, snapped trees, iced-over roads, dented cars and collapsed buildings in its wake.But, the political fallout lasted longer than the physical damage.
Five years later, local leaders acknowledge that human failures compounded the devastation wrought by Mother Nature.The post- storm reckoning was painful, but, as a result, the city-owned utility won't be inclined to repeat its mistakes, said David Price, who now chairs the board that oversees the BWL.
"I will always remember where I was, who I was with, what I was doing during the ice storm," said Price, who was a two-year veteran of the BWL Board of Commissioners when the ice storm hit.
Before the storm, he said, "We didn't know what we didn't know."
'Storm of the century'
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Price and other members of the BWL top brass weren't as prone to soul-searching.
During an emergency Lansing City Council meeting seven days after the storm hit — J. Peter Lark, then the BWL's general manager, apologized to customers who had been inconvenienced. He also characterized the disaster as the "storm of the century," emphasizing that BWL management did the the best it could in response to an uncontrollable act of nature.
Many residents, however, weren't placated.
Among them was Zipporah Champion, a college sophom*ore, who vented to City Council about how the storm had left her grandparents without heat for days in south Lansing. Champion said she slept only in shifts, waking up every two hours to make sure her grandparents were still alive.
"We live in Michigan, not Georgia, not California," Champion told city leaders on Dec. 30."Michigan is where God invented snow. We should have been overly prepared."
Independent investigations
Less than two monthsafter the storm, however, the BWL released an internal report that found the utility "could not anticipate the unprecedented damage."
In retrospect, Price said, that report wasn't critical enough. Independent investigations proved to be more searing.
Faced with public outcry, Lansing's then-Mayor Virg Bernero had appointed McDaniel, a homeland security and emergency preparedness expert, in January 2013to lead an independentinquiry into the BWL's storm response.
The result was a Community Review Team report that determined BWL policies, or lack thereof, had extended the length of outages by two to three days.
The report, released in May 2014, did cut the BWL some slack for circ*mstances beyond its control, like freezing temperature and the time of year. Customer frustration ran high during the holiday season and there were limited daylight hours to restore power, the CRT noted.
Nonetheless, the review teamidentified a litany of shortcomings and made more than 100 recommendations for change.
Another independent report, from the Michigan Public Service Commission, compared the BWL unfavorably to DTE Electric and Consumers Energy, two privately managed utilities with customers in Ingham, Eaton and Clinton counties. Those utilities restored power to more customers more quickly than the BWL did, the state regulator found.
As a municipalutility, BWL is not subject to PSC oversight the way DTE and Consumers are. Still, the MPSC concurred with the CRT's findings and added 30of its own recommendations.
100+ changes adopted
In 2015, BWL said they hadimplementedall the recommendations from both reports, at a cost of at least $5 million.
That includes the adoption of a more aggressive tree trimming program to prevent wayward branchesfrom knocking down power lines. For the first time in its history, the BWL is on track to trim all trees in its service area to meet industry best practices, current BWL General Manager Dick Peffley said recently.
In fiscal year 2018, the BWL spent $8.16 millionon tree trimming— more than 10 timesthe $747,793 it spent in 2012, the year before the ice storm.
TheBWL also has expanded its mutual aid agreements with other agencies and trained more electrical spotters— a direct response to shortages during the ice storm.
At the CRT's urging, the BWL has created a position for an emergency management director, charged specifically with overseeing crisis response.
"I'm not looking for an ice storm, but I don't fear one," Peffley said this week.
In the dark
The greatest of many failuresduring the ice storm was poor communication, Peffley said.
The BWL didn't communicateenough with Lansing city officials, and it communicated even less with officials from other communities, like Delta Township, the CRT found.
Customers reported being in the dark, both figuratively and literally. Because the BWL failed to provide satisfactory information about outages and estimated response times, residents turned to social media and crowd-sourced outage maps for updates
Residents who still lacked utilities when the BWL claimed it had restored power to 90% of customers on Dec. 23, "felt overlooked and forgotten by the utility, as they coped without power and heat for the holidays, discarded spoiled food, imposed on families or neighbors and, in cases where they were able to find rooms at local hotels, returned daily to their homes, to determine of power had been restored," the CRT wrote.
During the ice storm, the BWL struggled to track the scope of its own outage when its computerized Outage Management System failed, the CRT noted.
'Without the OMS, and without a backup system, Electrical Operations had to resort to an ad hoc paper system, which Operations candidly and repeatedly described as either “organized chaos” or “chaos,"' CRT investigators wrote.
BWL says it now relies on redundancies to backup its Outage Management System. It's also in the third year of a five-year $33 million rollout of Smart water and electric meters. Those meters can be read remotely, which will make it easier for the BWL to track outages and prioritize responding to the areas of greatest need.
More:
BWL to build $26M REO Town substation
Lansing BWL approves borrowing $500 million for plant, despite environmentalist opposition
Reform, restructuring
The BWL's response to outages was hamstrung, in part, due to the "insularity" of the company's senior leadership structure, the CRT found.
"The BWL structure and culture make reform difficult, if not impossible, from within, " investigators wrote. "The current corporate culture seems to replicate an investor-owned utility rather than a municipal utility."
At the CRT's recommendation, the BWL has since added more positions that report directly to the general manager, the BWL's top leader. The shift empowers people lower down in the corporate structure to make decisions more quickly, Peffley said.
"Otherwise you have a choke point in communications where it can take literally days for decisions to go through the company to get approved," Peffley said.
A 'rubber stamp'board?
The BWL's Board of Commissioners also came under scrutiny. In theory, the unpaid, political appointees are meant to ensure oversight of BWL management, but, in actuality, it was often management that called the shots, the CRT observed.
Until 2015, six of eight commissioners stood behind Lark, who was then theBWL's general manager. Only two commissioners, Cynthia Ward and Dennis Louney, broke ranks when they publicly criticized management in the months following the storm.
"You sortof wanted to be congenial, to get along," Price said. "Nobody wanted to be the bad guy. ... I think we probably weren't as hard on ourselves as we need to be."
Lansing Mayor Andy Schor, who took office in 2018, said the board has learned to play a more active role post ice-storm. Lansing's mayor appoints board members with approval from City Council.
"It's not a rubber stamp board," Schor said.
Although the BWL is owned by the city of Lansing, the utility's customers extend into neighboring communities, including East Lansing, Delta Township and Lansing Township. The CRT noted, however, that suburban territories lacked any representation on the utility's board.
To address that issue, Lansing voters approved a 2014 City Charter amendment that added three, non-voting suburban board seats.A 2015 charter amendment was another direct responseto a post-ice storm controversy— the amendment limitedseverance payments and contract lengths for at-will city employees.
Golden parachutes
Six months after a 7-1vote torenew Lark's contract with no changes in July2014, commissioners had a change of heart. In a 5-3 vote, the board fired the general manager for "just cause" in January 2015.According to his five-year contract, the move would have entitled the ex-general manager to six-months pay, or$129,251 of his$258,502annual salary.
But Lark threatened legal action against the board and ended up walking away with a $650,000 settlement.
Lark, who sold hisEast Lansing home in 2016, could not be reached for comment, He now owns one condo in Naples, a Florida beach community, and another in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington D.C., property records show.
The outrage over Lark's "golden parachute" prompted the board to take a more critical look at Peffley's contract, Price said.
Peffley has a $303,629 salary plus a $500 monthly vehicle allowance.His agreement allows him to be terminated with no separation payment if given 30 days notice.
In hindsight, Price wishes the board had fired Lark earlier. The release of the CRT report in 2014 should have been a turning point, he suggested.
Price now says he wishes he had done quite a few things differently.
"We didn't own it," he said. "The public needed to hear us really say 'I'm sorry,'and by the time they heard it, it was too late. I am sorry for that."
More storms are coming
The havoc unleashed by the ice storm was unprecedented in recent Lansing history, BWL leaders say. But the CRT noted in its report that extreme weather events are likely to become more common due to climate change.
People use more energy for heating and air conditioning to combat extreme temperatures, which takes a toll on electrical grids, McDaniel noted. He also predicted that more people will move to the Great Lakes region to escape rising sea levels,which will put further stress on the region's electrical capacity.
The reality of climate change makes emergency preparedness even more crucial, Peffley said.
"We're seeing things that we didn't used to see,"Peffley said. "100-year floods seem to be coming much more than every 100 years."
More:
Ice storm 1-yearanniversary: BWL faces change and concern
2014: A timeline of the politicalfallout from Lansing's 2013 ice storm
Contact Sarah Lehr at (517) 377-1056 or slehr@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahGLehr.
