A week after Storm Eowyn and NIE Networks’ army of workers remain under pressure to restore the last 16,000 customers’ power.
The red weather warning event has pushed Northern Ireland Electricity to its limit as staff have worked tirelessly to reconnect the country back to the grid.
At the storm’s peak, 30% of NIE’s customer base were left without power, equating to roughly 285,000 people. For perspective, that’s around one in every six people here.
Alex Houston is operations manager for NIE at its Craigavon control centre and helps oversee fault and emergency responses as well as emergency planning.
He has explained how the company deals with electrical faults in “unprecedented” circumstances like Storm Eowyn.
The control centre acts as the central hub for the district and communicates with local incident centres and staff on the ground.
Mr Houston explained that engineers “stand down” from all their normal work and move into their “storm role” when a major weather alert is imminent. Due to the widescale damage expected, NIE reached out to their partners in Great Britain early for additional resources.
The operations manager said: “Normally we would wait until after the event, but we proceeded to call for help early on this occasion because we saw the danger. This included staff, vehicles, materials and helicopters.”
Almost 400 additional staff are currently operating in NI, helping to rectify some 3,500 faults that continue to hamper the electrical grid. This includes retired engineers, staff from technology giant Sony and six incident response helicopters.
Mr Houston said NIE first sent out “runners” to identify faults and ascertain what equipment was required. They reported back to the control centre to log the incident and brief staff — then came the repair teams.
The electricity provider began sending out engineers shortly after the red warning ended and prioritised “danger to life” incidents and damage to “key infrastructure” such as radio towers and water pumping stations.
Storm Eowyn affected 30% of NIE’s customer base
This was followed by the high-voltage network (HV) where repairs typically restore around 500 houses at a time. The high-voltage network feeds into the low-voltage one, where the population is generally more sparse.
“That HV network then goes through those pole-mounted transformers onto your low-voltage network that feeds individual houses and properties and farms.
“It might only bring on 10 or 20 customers. This is the stage we’re at now where we’re starting to look at faults which have a lot lower number of customers.”
To bolster fault identification efforts, a rotation of six helicopters have been taking to the skies, assisting field operators with an overhead advantage to “scan large areas really fast”.
Mr Houston said: “That gives the local teams the ability then to plan and work on that repair really efficiently.
“The helicopter can find some other things that might be causing the line to trip in and out that we were not aware of.”
He added that the scale of Storm Eowyn has brought “significant findings” that will determine how the company “ramp up their response” for future weather events.
“After any big storm, we always do reports and implement our learning into our emergency plan,” Mr Houston explained.
“This will be no different in the sense that we’ll do a report but obviously there’ll be significant findings from this Storm in terms of the scale of it.”