Residents of Frelinghuysen received some positive news about the township’s electric grid along with a few answers about their negative power experiences.
Amy Overman, an external affairs specialist for Jersey Central Power & Light, spoke at a recent township committee meeting where she said reliability projects are progressing and also took time to explain restoration issues, which have been a major concern for the utility’s customers, who experience frequent power failures.
“When we have a major storm, when there are a lot of outages, when there’s a lot of damage, the first thing we do is we isolate the problem, make it safe, and then we assess damage,” Overman said.
The protocol followed is from JCP&L’s parent company, First Energy, Overman said. The process applies to all of First Energy’s subsidiaries such as Metropolitan Edison, across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. The strict process, she said, is to assure safety for everyone involved.
“It’s built this way for safety, for the safety of everyone involved,” Overman said. “Our line personnel and first responders. There’s very little wiggle room to this process.”
Overman also wanted to address customer concerns about what they might observe of workers on the restoration job.
“People say, We see your trucks, they’re on and off. What the heck’s going on? No one’s up in the bucket,” she said. “Usually it’s because they’re assessing damage and they’re trying to isolate. And when I say isolate, what we’re doing in those first few hours is when we’re getting calls for wires on fire, arcing, things of that nature.”
Work to restore is determined by the numbers of customers on a circuit, not by municipality. Priority is still based on numbers, however.
“I just want to explain that, because people that live in smaller municipalities, they think, oh, we only have 500 people. Oh, we’re going to be last,” Overman said. “Not necessarily. We do it by circuit, so if the circuit has a thousand people out, it could be across a couple towns. We’re going to work to restore those thousand people first, as opposed to maybe if there’s a 10-person outage, that’ll come in the next cue. Then we restore largest to smallest.”
Most important, she stressed, is that people report when their power is out. Customers often assume neighbors and other residents have probably reported the problems, Overman said. That’s not always the case. And just as important, she added, that the greater the number of reports from a given area, the better chance that problem has of moving up the queue.
In the long term, Overman said the circuit that supplies most of Frelinghuysen—known as the Blairstown Circuit because it originates at the Blairstown substation—will be divided into two separate circuits. In addition, the Blairstown circuit is undergoing an update that will allow customers’ power to be rerouted during power failures.
“There’s going to be a brand new circuit,” Overman said. “It’s what’s called loop schemes and automatic ties. So, in Frelinghuysen, we’re going to be able to feed all the customers that, when there’s an outage on one circuit, we’re going to be able to move you over to the other circuit. And it’s going to be amazing when this is done.”
And it’s expected to be done by the end of the year, she said.
In the meantime, the most frequent cause of power outages remains trees and branches, and JCP&L will continue its drive to make the power lines less susceptible to falling limbs, Overman said.
Joe brings decades of journalism experience to the Ridge View Echo, covering everything from local school boards to the U.S. Supreme Court. A former National Law Journal editor and Columbia Law School press officer, he now enjoys telling community stories in Blairstown, where he lives with his wife, Rose, and their two dachshunds.
- Joe Phalon, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/joe-phalon-contributing-writer/
- Joe Phalon, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/joe-phalon-contributing-writer/
- Joe Phalon, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/joe-phalon-contributing-writer/
- Joe Phalon, Contributing Writerhttps://ridgeviewecho.com/author/joe-phalon-contributing-writer/
