Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
EDF ENERGY NETWORKS
16 SEPTEMBER 2003
Q20 Mr Berry: Who was responsible
for emergency planning before that?
Mr Cuttill: In the previous organisation
known as 24/7 there was a director of the electricity division
and he was responsible for it. One of the things we did was to
take it away from a management role and deploy it specifically
to an individual who has had experience and expertise in this
area. He was appointed between October and Christmas 2002.
Q21 Mr Berry: Previously the emergency
planning role was not given particularly great importance, was
it?
Mr Cuttill: It was not given the
importance that Mr Carey and I believed it warranted once we got
to grips with the organisation.
Q22 Mr Berry: Thank you for being
candid about that. You have also said that all staff now have
assigned storm roles. You said that earlier. Before that change
is it therefore the case that staff at the time of the crisis
in October did not know what to do in a situation such as that?
Mr Cuttill: I would not characterise
it that staff did not know what they were to do. The staff in
the absolute front line in terms of restoration are very experienced
staff, highly professional staff. In those sorts of events they
knew what it was they had to do. Within the business I am responsible
for we have 4,000 staff spread across our east network, our London
network and our south network. In October it was not the case,
as it is today, that 80% of those 4,000 staff know that they have
a role in a weather-derived incident; they know what that role
is and they know, as we move into a weather situation, what it
is they are required to do. For instance, some of our office-based
staff in our connections business on a day-to-day business are
not involved in the restoration of supplies, but in a weather-related
incident they can easily become customer contact people in the
field; they can be visiting customers, explaining what is going
on; they can be helping us scouting the lines so that we can understand
much quicker and earlier the condition of the network post the
event. The difference in October 2002 was that we did not use
all of our people in a storm role; it was very much left to the
day-to-day restoration activities. We have now broadened that.
When you have one of these events, there is no bigger challenge
in front of you on the days that you have this, and so our ability,
as it were, to curtail our normal work in favour of restoring
supplies to customers is something that we now have, and it was
not in place in October to the degree that I have described.
Q23 Mr Berry: I am sure that your
colleagues did everything they could to respond to the crisis.
Mr Cuttill: Yes.
Q24 Mr Berry: And it must have been
very difficult for all your staff. You have described changes
that have been made since October that suggest very significant
changes. The thing that strikes me is that the changes seem to
be so significant that you are describing a situation prior to
October that . . . How can I put it? . . . for a distribution
company seems pretty inadequate to deal with the kind of emergencies
we all know about. The weather is something that people in this
country talk about all the time. It seems a bit odd for a distribution
company not to have more highly developed emergency procedures.
Or do you think I am being unfair?
Mr Cuttill: I think I would perhaps
say there is some unfairness in what you say. Equally, however,
I think it must be remembered about the October 2002 event that
in a nine-hour period we sustained something in the order of six
months' worth of high voltage faults and a year's worth of low
voltage faults. In the space of nine hours. By anybody's analysis,
that is a very, very severe event. There had been weather-derived
events prior to October 2002 that 24/7 had been able to cope with
adequately. The scale of this event, as I have described, put
the plan under such pressure that it was clear that it was not
adequate for that severe event. And those are the lessons we have
sought to learn. It is not that it was totally inadequate beforehand.
That is not the case. It was adequate, but when an event of this
severity arrived it was found not to be in a position by which
it could respond in the way we are now able to respond.
Q25 Mr Djanogly: Following this blow
by blow at the time, it seemed to me that it was not only a question
of not having enough staff, it was also a question of the ones
that you had did not get there fast enough. The storm happened,
as you say, within nine hours, but it was not until, I think,
three or four days later that you started having your teams come
in from round the country in the numbers that were necessary.
Mr Cuttill: Again, I would say
that we have acknowledged that our mustering of resources, both
of our own and also the enactment of what is known as the NEWSAC
arrangements—which is the mutual aid across the industry—that
enactment on our part was not as speedy as it has been subsequent
in the other events. I would say, though—and Mr Carey may
correct me if I am wrong on this—that I do believe, the
event having hit on the Sunday, that we had NEWSAC derived support
with us on the Tuesday. So within 48 hours they were there—bearing
in mind that this was a storm that impacted all of the Midlands
to southern distribution companies, so they are going through
the process of obviously restoring themselves before they can
release. So by the Tuesday we had NEWSAC derived resource.
Q26 Mr Djanogly: You brought in teams
from France, did you not?
Mr Cuttill: They arrived on the
Monday afternoon and were deployed for the first time on the Tuesday
morning.
Q27 Mr Djanogly: How many French
staff came in?
Mr Cuttill: A hundred.
Q28 Mr Djanogly: And that was because
you did not have enough elsewhere in the country?
Mr Cuttill: That was the fear
we had on the Sunday. The same storm had also hit northern France.
The resources from EDF actually came from the Montpellier region—they
were flown up during the Monday—because EDF themselves were
into fairly big restoration on the north of France.
Q29 Mr Djanogly: I appreciate this
is not directed at your company but of course we are looking at
the industry as a whole in reacting to storms, and you are a large,
one of the largest electricity—
Mr Cuttill: Yes, we are.
Q30 Mr Djanogly: You are the largest
electricity company.
Mr Cuttill: We are.
Q31 Mr Djanogly: What about the smaller
companies who do not have staff in France? Should we have wider
concerns there? I mean, you can pull teams from all round the
country.
Mr Cuttill: I am certain that
when my colleagues give evidence subsequent to me they can speak
about their own arrangements. We now have eight pretty substantial
distribution network operators covering what we would know as
the old 14 licensed areas, so we do have a lot of consolidation
that has gone on. That does provide a lot of mutual support. I
think in times of these weather-derived incidents there is a very
high level of mutual aid. I think, perhaps understandably, there
is a small reticence amongst companies to make sure they have
their own house going in the right direction before they are able
to release to others—I think that is a reasonable place
to be—but I think the events of 2002 have garnered a new
sense of cooperation between the eight of us, because, as I think
the Chairman referred to at the beginning, there but for the grace
of God go us all in terms of these events. We certainly struggled
in October. It could well be that next time round it is one of
our colleague companies that bears the brunt and it is therefore
very important for us to play our part in assisting those. I am
certain that the eight distribution network operators in Great
Britain are absolutely committed to the mutual aid process.
Q32 Chairman: Mr Cuttill, maybe I
should have asked you this earlier but when one thinks of Great
British storms, as it were—and I am not suggesting that
someone should produce a book Storms We Have Known—1987
was I think the last real big blast, you might say. How did that
compare with this one? Do you have any records of that? We all
remember the trees being taken down—and Robert Smith will
be looking at trees in a wee while—but on this question
of how severe it was, it just struck me that these things do happen
and we just do not blame them on a butterfly's wings flapping
in Tokyo. How does it compare with past experience?
Mr Cuttill: With your indulgence,
Mr Carey, who has worked in the industry for 40 years, was in
an operational role in 1987, so he can speak of his own experiences
in a moment. I would say that the BPI report acknowledges that
this was the most severe weather incident since 1987. There was
plenty of debate at the time about relative wind speeds and all
that sort of thing but the impact that certainly we saw, that
I have described in terms of six months' worth of HV and a year's
worth of LV in nine hours, by any analysis is a severe event and
it is the most severe since 1987. Perhaps Mr Carey can give a
couple of thoughts on that.
Q33 Chairman: Could I just say that
I am really trying to get a sense of perspective because I realise
that 15 years is a long time. Mr Carey, you and I are probably
of an age, and not everybody is in the one job for that length
of time and things can change, but, if you could give us a wee
bit of perspective, that would be helpful.
Mr Carey: Thank you, Chairman.
I think all the analysis since the events has shown that for an
inland area of the country this was very, very comparable to the
1987 hurricane. The worst hit inland area was the east of England,
centred around Bury St Edmunds and outwards, so in terms of impact
on our network in that part of the country, it was very similar.
I had actually done some personal research anyway with previous
colleagues in that area, and that is confirmed just from local
knowledge. I guess the significant difference, though, in terms
of how it was dealt with, is the investment in automation that
has been carried out since then. You will see from the reports
that actually we did restore 340,000 people on the first day.
The significant difference compared to the hurricane was that
in 1987 the industry would not have restored that number of people
so quickly. That is a direct comparison. Although we did have
problems with call handling and so on back in 1987, the call-handling
availability was not as good as it is now, so there were some
key differences. In terms of the actual severity, it was very,
very similar for the east of England.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q34 Linda Perham: Could I just focus
on the restoration of supply. You mentioned 340,000 restored quite
quickly. Paragraph 11 in your evidence refers to 66% being restored
within 24 hours and 92% within 48 hours, but that some of the
remaining 25,000 customers in the east of England took up to nine
days.
Mr Cuttill: Correct.
Q35 Linda Perham: When you say "some"
of 25,000, do you have a figure? How many people were off supply
for that length of time?
Mr Cuttill: We went into the weekend,
if my memory serves me correctly, with about 4,000 to go, so on
the Saturday and Sunday we were restoring the final 4,000 customers—and
that was the seventh and eighth day, as it were. The final customer,
I believe, was restored in the early hours of Monday, nine days
after the storm hit. In terms of where we were, as you may be
aware, restoration comes down the voltage levels, so you restore
at the high voltage first. That gets tens and tens of thousands
of customers back through one operation. At the tail end we could
be spending, and did spend, five or six hours restoring one customer,
who is perhaps at the end of a 400 yard overhead line, for whom
we are having to restore the whole line. The issue we had was
the mustering of resource and the anticipation of what is the
tail of the restoration. One of the other complicating factors
is that when you restore HV you believe you have restored the
customers behind HV, and you then discover there is an LV fault.
So you actually believe that customer X is back and you then find
customer X is not back because, whilst you have restored the HV
connection, there is then an LV fault—some wind-blown debris
on the line which then has to be cleared and the line repaired.
The issue for us, which we did much better in January, was to
understand and anticipate in a much better way the tail of the
restoration. As you come down the voltage levels—and it
felt like running a marathon in the week—it is a bit like
a marathon: you sort of hit a wall at a point. For a 24-hour period
your number of customers disconnected does not appear to go down:
you are putting plenty back on but you are actually discovering
others, because, as you restore, you come across single supply
faults. It was the tail of the restoration that caused us the
most problems.
Q36 Linda Perham: You do mention
persisting residual faults on the low voltage network.
Mr Cuttill: Correct.
Q37 Linda Perham: The faults, were
they faults that were existing, which were brought to light by
this crisis, or were they faults that arose as you went along?
Mr Cuttill: The vast majority
would have been as a result of the weather incident. However,
during the week we were not only seeking to restore all the customers
affected by the incident on 27 October, but our network sustains
faults on a day-to-day basis. In the same week we probably had
40 other faults elsewhere on this east network that needed attention
that were nothing to do with the weather incident on the Sunday
at all, so we are having to restore those customers as well. The
effort was not only about dealing with the tail of restoration
from the storm event but dealing with our normal day-to-day business.
Q38 Linda Perham: If I could turn
to communications with customers. You have listed in paragraph
25—and I think you mentioned in your first answer to the
Chairman—the steps you have taken to improve communications.
Mr Cuttill: Yes.
Q39 Linda Perham: What will that
mean in practice for people telephoning during another crisis?
Mr Cuttill: We would anticipate
that more would reach our messaging service. The primary desire
from customers we found, during the week, is to understand that
we know they are off supply and some indication of restoration.
We believe that the improvements we have made mean that we can
get those messages to our customers in a more effective way. We
have adjusted the way our messaging service works. In October
2002, it was driven from a single place. It is now driven from
four separate places, so we have greater levels of contingency.
In addition, we now have the facility by which we can get up to
340 additional agents deployed through our own call centres for
our supply business, be that in Hove, in Exeter or in Sunderland.
We can actually get more agents sitting on seats to answer questions.
We did not have that ability at the beginning of the week in 2002.
We have clearly had a lot of discussions with BT also about the
capacity of the 0800 platform to cope with the vast number of
calls that such a weather event can generate—and not only
for utilities. Clearly many, many of the transport providers also
run 0800 numbers and in such a weather incident that 0800 platform
comes under significant pressure of call volume. The final point
of discussion with BT is whether there is any restriction on local
networks by which we can get the calls coming in. I think the
steps we have taken will provide greater opportunity for us to
interact with our customers in a better way than we did in October.
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