Recommendation to receive and file a presentation and discussion by Southern California Edison detailing the cause of the July 15, 2015 and July 30, 2015 power outages and steps taken to address/prevent future outages of a similar nature. (Citywide)
Report from City Manager Recommendation to receive and file a presentation and discussion by Southern California Edison detailing the cause of the July 15th and July 30th power outages and steps taken to address prevent future outages of a similar nature citywide. Mr. West. Yes, Mayor. Councilmembers were all aware that we had some severe power outages recently in the city of Long Beach. Southern California Edison is here to address that with us tonight with some of their senior leadership. I'm going to have deputy city manager Arturo Sanchez give a quick introduction and then we'll give it over to Southern California Edison . Arturo. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor Garcia and members of the city council. On September 8th, the City Council received a brief report from city staff regarding the outages that occurred in summer. At during that report, Edison staff were present and the city council specifically asked them to return to provide an update and to present the results of an independent and an internal investigation once they were completed. Those two investigations were completed in November, and this is the first opportunity that Southern California Edison has had to return to provide that report. Providing us the information tonight will be Dietrich, the senior vice president of Transmission and Distribution, Cedric. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of the City Council for the opportunity to speak with you this evening. Just first say that we take our responsibility to provide safe, reliable, affordable electric service very, very seriously and are deeply disappointed in our performance that led to these outages back in the July timeframe. I hold myself personally responsible and accountable for what occurred there, and we are taking the appropriate measures within our organization to make sure that these things don't occur. And I wanted to talk about those tonight in the form of just a brief presentation about the two reports that we commissioned to to look into this one was an internal investigation led by our own staff and have a traditional root cause investigation that involved the internal and external analysis and evaluations. Look at inspections and records, number of interviews and use to establish root cause analysis methodology to reach a cause for for the for the Long Beach outages. Second to that, we commissioned independently a company that has specific expertize and utility risk assessment operations and emergency management and that would be Davey's Consulting from Washington, DC to come in and take a look at independently both our analysis of the cause of the outages as well as our response to the outages, our response to the incidences which created the disruptions here within the city of Long Beach. We did take a very thorough look at that. And I just want to talk about the causes and gaps in recommended actions that have come out of each one of those reports and then certainly make myself available to answer any questions that the Council may have. As far as our internal investigation. What we identified as the cause of the Long Beach outages was improper operation and insufficient management oversight of the Long Beach network system. While the system had been very reliable since the mid 1950s, we did see it and in hindsight looking at it that there were a few mis operations and missed performances that caused the sequence of events that led to the outages that occurred July 15th and July 30th. Specific gaps that we identified that we have since addressed or are addressing is a lack of ownership of the responsibility for observing the reliability of the network by a single entity within our operation. We have now established that within our Long Beach district and our our Long Beach District Manager is the individual who's responsible for that within our company. We also have identified the need for more thorough operation protocols for operating the network. As we get got into the situation of identifying the problem and restoring the problem. And we recognize that we didn't have the most efficient and appropriate procedures for being able to bring the network back in the most timely manner. We also identified that some of our staff had not received recent training while they were experienced and capable, they had not received recent training on some of the unique natures of the equipment and the equipment alignments that are important related to the Long Beach Network. And we are addressing that. Yet also some of we did identify that by by looking at other municipalities and utilities that that operate networks, that some networks and utilities had looked at advances as far as the sophisticated controls and modeling that were available and have been since developed to allow us to have a better understanding and a better handling on exactly the conditions of the network, on the days in question, as well as all other days. So as far as actions and recommendations from our own report, I mentioned that we've we've established a network owner. We have gone through also and improve the mapping of all of our network equipment, our cabling. We found that that's very important also that over time we had made some slight changes to that and our mapping was not up to speed with exactly what the conditions were in the field. We have enhanced the automation of the network equipment for this equipment to now communicate with us remotely and inform us of the status. And we have a dedicated staff now looking at the status of the network. Every day we've developed that network modeling capability. So in real time, our engineers can look at, as things occur on the network, what the power flows are and what the capacity issues may be to make sure that we are not approaching any limits or any challenges associated with the network. We have improve our detailed inspections and equipment maintenance. We also, as a result of some of the vault lids becoming dislodged due to due to over pressurization events in the in the in the vaults. We did tether the vault lids here in downtown Long Beach on the on the Long Beach downtown network enclosures. We're in the process of we've already improved and implemented some, but we continue to improve training for our technicians, operators and engineers and also enhance our operational controls and measures for the way that we operate the network. The Davey's Consulting Report looked at our cause analysis, but also, as I mentioned, looked independently at both our response to the event as well as our preparation for and our what should have been our ability to ability to prevent the event. And in summary, their conclusion was that insufficient execution of the incident response and management processes for the network and the network outages were the cause of our issues there. There. While their report supported our conclusions, it also pointed out some additional measures that we continue to look at. One of that. One of the things. We identified and we appreciate the feedback from the city staff and the city officials was insufficient communication and interaction upfront with critical stakeholders. We are making improvements to ensure that we do have a more robust response to situations like this, whether they were to occur within Long Beach or within other parts of our service territory. I've already mentioned the lack of federal protocols in the operation of the network. We were able to reach out to some of these other utilities and we had in fact experienced individuals as part of this Davey's consulting report who had been involved in other network issues throughout the country, come in and provide us some of their lessons learned and learnings from some of the shortcomings that they had experienced. We did have a delayed understanding of the incident complexity. Some of that goes to the way our systems reported out to us, the condition here in the in the city that night of July 15th. We have addressed that so that we have a clear understanding of the complexity of the incident. And we did recognize that this issue for us was somewhat unique, where traditionally we had seen more widespread problems across multiple districts or across multiple areas. This was a very concentrated issue within a specific part of our service territory that has unique equipment and unique operating characteristics and required more engineering analysis and understanding of exactly what the cause was. And that's the part of our branch, our incident command system that was not yet fully mature. But we are using again the learnings from this incident to make sure that we build that into our incident command system and into our response to future events. So we have also completed most of the actions and recommendations coming from the Davey's Consulting Report. We do have a few that we continue to work on. One is enhancing our incident response and stakeholder communication. Again, your feedback to us has been very valuable here. We recognize our shortcomings there, social media, particularly in our ability to work very interactively with you and your first responders in real time to share information, and then also improving our local agency collaboration. We recognize the impact we had on first responders and upon a number of not just the businesses and the customers and folks in the Long Beach area, but all the people that support day to day work and life here in downtown Long Beach and making sure that we are interfacing appropriately with all of those local agencies. So in conclusion, I just want to reiterate that we're deeply disappointed. We apologize. And we do accept full responsibility for the extent and duration of the outages. We're committed to providing that safe, reliable and affordable power to our customers. We take that responsibility very seriously and we take your feedback and improvement recommendations very seriously. Also, we are focusing on completing all of our immediate actions. We have completed many of them as well as the follow up and subsequent corrective actions. We continue to study the Davey's report and some of the recommendations contained therein. We have learned quite a bit from being able to to use some of their experts who had experience in the city of New York and some of the other major metropolitan areas with problems that they've experienced on their network. Also, one bullet that I wanted to point out is this partnering with our Electric Power Research Institute. While that may sound a little subtle, what I want to point out there is that there are a number of municipalities across the country that have these, what I'll call a smaller network configuration. And there have been problems on those networks. We certainly don't use that as any kind of justification for the problem here. But we're able to take a look at the corrective action plans that they put together as a result of their issues and compare ours to theirs and make sure that ours is as robust and appropriate in making sure that we address all the appropriate problems and issues that that we encountered here. We continue to improve our restoration protocols for critical and significant events and provide ongoing training to to our staff to make sure that that they're able to interact effectively, not just with customers. But, as I mentioned, with with all the local agencies, we will work to complete the balance of the corrective actions. And then we'll also do an effectiveness review six months from now to ensure that these actions have all been completed effectively and that the internalization of these actions has been built into our system. So, again, apologize for the for the inconvenience of the outages. We do take full responsibility and it is certainly our issue to address. And with that, I'll pause and see if there's any questions from members of the city council. Thank you and thank you. I want a couple of comments and then I have a motion in a second to receive and file. And if there's council questions or comments, we'll take those as well. Let me just first just begin by obviously, you know, I want to and I mentioned this already to the to to the president . Obviously, we're grateful that you guys stepped up and admitted full responsibility. I think that's most important. It was an incredibly difficult event for the city to go through. And I and we can't forget or gloss over the fact that it affected a lot of people, both their income, their health, their livelihood. It affected our operations. It was a financial impact to the city, to businesses, to conventions. And most importantly, it took a toll on people's emotionally to have to not have power for days and days and days. And not having information is difficult, especially for seniors. For those that need special support or have special needs. And we've talked about all of that. And so the fact that you guys took that responsibility, I think is important. It doesn't change the fact that what we went through was was difficult and not something that we ever expect to go through again or want to. We do appreciate that. I know that we've been able to resolve some of our financial questions with the city. And so I think that is a positive step in the right direction where I think we still have some challenges. And I think you've begun to address some of those and I've mentioned these is all of these next steps I think are expected, and we're we're expecting those to happen. You know, two things that I think are important is one, I think your SC is aware that there is a community confidence breakdown. I mean, there is a lack of confidence, I think both from myself, personally, the body, but the community. And I think the community needs to rebuild that trust over time. It's not going to happen overnight. And I think that it's incumbent upon Edison to go out into the community and. Communicate, engage, be present at community functions. And so I think that presence needs to increase. I think we need to be able to answer questions. We get questions all the time from the community about what's happening or what the next step is. And, you know, as you know, we're not the utility. And so we try to answer what we can. But I think you guys having a presence in the community is really important. And I will again double down on what I mentioned before, which is the communication piece, which I thought was a complete failure during the crisis, needs to be strengthened. And it sounds like you're aware of that. You know, the fact that I think myself and others were for some folks, the main form of getting information through through Twitter or through email is not acceptable. You know, that's something that's your guys job to get information out to everybody. And we should be there to provide support, to provide emergency response. But we don't know what's happening every single minute. And I think and so I'm glad to hear that that's something you guys are addressing. Absolutely. So I do appreciate that. And I think that that's a really important step. The communication and the community confidence building are two things that are really important moving forward. And I'll just add also that I think these two reports are important, and I appreciate the kind of introspection that's happened in the company. Long Beach is your largest client. So we know we this is a relationship that is critical for our both sides. And I think that we we're also as you know, we expect the last staff the the the PSC report should be out, from what I understand, in the next couple of months, first part of this year. Mr. West or Mr. Sanchez, do we know when that will be out? We don't have a date, but we are expecting it to, you know, hopefully in the next couple of months. Yeah. I mean, I've been it's been communicated to me that it would be the first part of this year. And so I think we expect that. And I think it's important to to have all the pieces of both the internal review and the state review to put together a full picture of kind of what happened and then what the appropriate response is. And so thank you for coming and giving this report to the council and answering the tough questions. And I think there will be additional questions once we get the PSC report as well. And it's important to answer those honestly with the public and to be out there. And so we await that. There is a let me let me get the most in and the second for the and file, which is Councilwoman Gonzales and Councilman Andrews. And turn this over to Councilwoman Gonzalez. Great. So I, too, want to thank you all for being here as well. I know it was a tough time for us in the summer, and I just really do appreciate the fact that you're here. You're apologizing not to this body, but just to the public, because we did have to answer to them quite frequently. But I will I don't intend to belabor the issue, but I will. It's communication, communication, communication as much as possible. And I think we've all learned a lesson in that. You know, we learn from these instances crisis is are never expected. But it's certainly something that we we just learn from move on and then we go from there and hopefully better the process. And so I will continue to say that now I in speaking with your government relations team who is great, I know that they had talked about additional precautions, especially for our seniors or those with special needs, finding a list to identify where they're at. So there's not you know, I know while we're going through this issue, it was, you know, contacting public safety, letting them know who was where. And so do we have are you currently conducting like an identification process to know where people are, especially those with higher risk health needs ? Yes, ma'am. We are we do keep a list of folks that have medical necessity for electrical power. And we continue to look at that process and ways that we can improve that process. We are also looking at better ways that we can, in each of our municipalities, identify senior centers and other places that may be high priority items for us or high priority locations as far as being able to provide some communication. So that was some of the recommendations coming from the Davey's report. And we're absolutely looking at them great. Especially those that are in the high rise buildings. It's hard to get down for them or, you know, they have elevator access, no elevator access after the power's out. So that's great to hear. And then lastly, I know many of our residents, you know, the first district, I think was hit the hardest, I'm sure is. You know, and as far as customer service, I know there were a few residents that contacted our office specifically about contacting customer service, and they were my neighbors who lived in my building. We were all affected, but they had mentioned that they, the customer service did not you know, they talked about their power outage and customer service did not identify them as being a power outage resident. And so frustrated quite a few residents in getting their reimbursements or getting their food checks for food that had been spoiled, especially for some seniors. So I know some of them had been pretty swift and quick, but there were others that didn't get that. So I don't know how that information is being relayed to your customer service, but I would just leave that as another point to think about, because we did get a few comments related to that. Otherwise, again, I want to thank you for being here. I appreciate it. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilman Andrews. Yes, thank you. I also would like to commend you and your crew for coming in tonight and accepting this responsibility. But I don't think we need to be labor on, you know, what is happening and how we're going to take care of it. Because you guys came up here to let us know that you are taking a very serious, you know, look at this. And I really believe that whatever has happened, these things will be able to be solved in the future. And I don't know why it was so prevalent in my district because I never got one call. So evidently you guys must be looking over the six district because we didn't get any outage. So could be God, it could be your group. But I want to thank you for it and just keep up the good work, all the other complaints that's on them. I'm not complaining. I just want to thank you guys. Look. I'm not touching anyone. All right. Thank you. Councilmembers Hooper. Thank you. And I'd like to thank you for the report tonight and being here. And I find the report incredibly. Revealing and very useful. And I'll just speak about downtown for now. I think the common thinking was there was a hardware issue or an old city. It's an old network. There were probably some hardware issues involved. But your analysis here says, no, it's human error, it's management processes. So to me, that's I don't think we can guarantee it's kind of a wakeup call that that this was the cause, not something else. But what worries me about that is that's the type of thing that can devolve over the years. You can get a system in place now, and if management changes and whatnot, you're back to square one. So I'm a little concerned about that. Secondly, and I'm kind of I'd like to be a forward thinking person and we have a new civic center going in here. The first thing I believe we need to get straight is that we're going to have power to that civic center. And considering you're you're not dealing with an existing structure anymore, is there any process, are there any processes in place or any kind of, you know, reassurances you can give us that you're going back to square one and trying to work on the network to supply power to the whole area? Yeah. Thank you for your question. We have we were already looking at the new civic center and we have several considerations that we're looking at. But we currently don't see any issue with with being able to provide safe, reliable, affordable service to the to the new civic center. You know, that that facility can be both on the network as well as off the network. And that's one of the things that we're looking at. And we will be talking with with the appropriate members of the city staff about our current plans right now would be to not have it on the network. But again, that's something that we can be speaking with the city staff about. But we we have no particular loading issues on the network. We don't have any particular overload issues here in the Long Beach area. Again, it was human mistakes that occurred over time that led to the outages. So it's our commitment to make sure that those things don't occur again. Thank you, Councilman. Richard. I'm sorry, customer. You all done? Okay. Councilman Richardson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And no pun intended, but I'm still in the dark on the last. Last time you came. I asked about that lay down yard just along the 17, and it was supposed to be temporary, but it's going like four years. And you guys said you would get back to us and let us know what the status is or how long it's going to be there. So I still want to know that. And then and in case you didn't know, there's a power outage right now in North Long Beach. We are very well aware of all the outages that occur in Long Beach and are prepared to talk about those. I'll also share with you that tonight we are seeing issues across our system. Okay. Right now we've got about 10,000 of our 5 million customers out, primarily due to the wind and rain associated with the storm. But we are very closely monitoring all those outages and including the Long Beach outages. So you think we can maybe have a conversation about that later on? Yes, sir, we will. We will absolutely follow up with you. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Mangum. Thank you for being here. Over the last several weeks, I've had discussions with the new representative, that is our government relations individual from Southern California Edison. And as you said, there have been communication challenges. Our office has provided opportunities for Southern California Edison to participate in community events. I think the initial response from the staff member was, I'll get you information to hand out. And I think that that's not our expectation. I think we were very clear about that. It's been a week and we'd very much like to hear a positive response that you'll be participating in the upcoming community events in February. It's critical that our community has that face to face contact that the mayor and I feel very strongly about. And so our office will follow up again tomorrow and we hope to hear that positive response, because this is this is an opportunity we're providing the constituents, all of them in a gathered area for you. We're doing a direct mailing to the community about the event and what I had expected to hear from a company that has turned their their thinking around would have been. Absolutely. Yes. Thank you so much for bringing constituents together. Let us seize this opportunity to engage with the community. So I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow. Okay. Thank you for your feedback. Thank you. Seeing no other council questions at this time. Public comment, please. Thank you. If you're public comment, please come forward. Sure. No, I think. Larry. Good. You click as the address. Let me begin with a positive comment. And quite frankly, it's the only positive, constructive observation I've had in dealing with community efforts in the Southern California Edison. And that was back in 1995 when a community effort went forward to update and to put in complete operation the six flagpoles that line the Marine Stadium. And it was a great community effort between the residents growing community and the ship Chandlers and so forth. And Southern California Edison stepped up and provided the one of their poles. They no longer use Metropoles, which is the base we have for our flagpole in the at the Rowing Center. But beyond that, the conduct of Southern California Edison, in my view, has been directly repugnant to what a good corporation should be. For almost ten years now, we've been trying to get information relative to what was originally just a small electrical pad in a light in Marina Vista Park, which the Planning Commission recognizes were ugly and had to get out of there. And for the past eight years have been trying to get a straight answer out of the corporate office, and they've essentially given the community the little finger they need to that $82 billion corporation of what or whatever it is, needs to get their act together and haul ass out of that park and find an appropriate place to put that equipment. I think there's been an unauthorized or at least the community wasn't aware of it. It looks if you go there now looking and based upon the information that City Light and Power and other contractors have said, it looks as if somebody is trying to establish a sister city relationship with Schenectady. There's so much power in there and we can't get a straight answer at a Southern California Edison that needs to be moved. And it's particularly important for two reasons. Number one, it's right in the middle of a search path for Emerson Army. But number two, we need that space. There will be the open channel within a year created and so us. So they need to find a location of their own. One other thing they can confirm or deny, but it was my understanding from the former resident association in Belmont Shore had indicated that Southern California Edison was fined the largest fine in the state for lying about customer falsifying customer service reports as a result. So so their higher management could get bigger bonuses. I don't know if that's true, but I'd like them to tell us tonight. Thank you. That's true. Thank you. And also find a place. At times atmosphere. Can you. Find a place to put that transformer. Next speaker? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Pardon me. It's Gary Shelton again. Appreciate the report we received from Mr. Dietrich. I appreciate the pointed questions from my council member, Lena Gonzales. Thank you for that very much. The item is talking about the root cause, and we heard what the root cause is. And so I really appreciate what Council Member Supernova had to say because it dovetailed with what I was thinking all along and listening for, but did not hear in Mr. Dietrich's report, which. Well, I'll start by saying maybe we've had the same. Maybe you've had the experience I've had, particularly as a kid years ago, where if the waffle iron was on and the microwave was on, I wasn't a kid when we had microwaves, but the waffle iron in, let's say the stove was on and somebody pushed down the toaster and the circuit would blow. Now, that was the cause of the circuit blowing. The root cause, I suppose we could say, was improper operation and management of the system. But I think what you're going to be asked tomorrow by your constituents is what happened? And we didn't hear that. Did something melt? Did something overheat? Did something cause gases to blow up? I live about a hundred feet from where the first manhole cover flew in the air and was leaving under yellow tape to go to your city meeting with police, telling us, watch out, you got to go that way. There's other manhole covers going up into the air. Something was going on besides improper operation and management of the system. I came here tonight and sat through a lot of meeting, hoping to hear what that was. If it was a simple connection that twisted, or if it was something that that melted or if it was something that snapped. I think we deserve to know that also. Thank you very much. Thank you, Alex. Speaker, please. Tom Stout I'm just curious. Business Journal has all this development that's going on down here, which is a lot, and it's going to put a lot of stress on the system that we have. If it did, the system couldn't support what we have, and I don't buy that at all. Management. I mean, a lot of it is, you know, there's in it management every place, even in this city. So the bottom line is, if we can't support the infrastructure for the what we have in the city now, when you add hundreds, if not thousands of new drawers by having more rooms, condos and such. How are you going to assure us that you're not going to continue to overload the system? I mean, I happened to be out of town when it went out in Wrigley, so that didn't really affect me. Nothing was damaged or everything worked fine when I returned. But, you know, these continued out is that there's more to do than just bad management. That's a part of it. But, you know, lack of training, poor quality of workmanship, all have been pointed out in various ways. But I'm really concerned that all this development is going to overload a system that's not adequate already. How's that going to be addressed? It wasn't mentioned that any of the meetings about City Hall or the development, it's you know, nobody seemed to really be concerned. But if you were in one of the parts of town that has a power failure and I don't remember any sitting having has many power failures as long each day . Maybe there are, but there sure not any around here that we know of. So I'm concerned and I think a lot of people are. What's going to happen when all this other stuff comes online? We need some answers. Thank you. Any other public comment on this item? Okay. Seeing seeing none. And again, this is a continuing conversation and certainly not the end of this conversation. I know that staff has been in a lot of contact with the team and that continues. And and Mr. West, I expect that when the PUC report comes out, you would come back to counsel and that we'd get a presentation on that as well. Okay. Thank you. There's a motion and a second on this. Please cast your vote to receive and file. Motion carries. Thank you. Next item, please. Item 18 recommendation from Economic and Property Development and recommendation to execute a supplemental agreement to management agreement with SMG for the completion of certain capital improvement projects for the sea side way, pedestrian bridge and connections at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, located at 300 East Ocean Boulevard, District two.