State probing St. Louis power outages

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- State regulators launched an investigation Thursday into the way Ameren Corp. and other utilities prepared for and responded to severe storms that left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.

The Missouri Public Service Commission said it had received complaints that Ameren's call center and Internet site could not handle the crush of concerned customers after the first of two storms hit July 19. The situation was made worse by a heat wave and second severe storm two days later.

Investigators also will look into whether Ameren properly kept trees trimmed back from power lines before the storm, how it prioritized its response to downed lines and how quickly it reached out for help from other utilities.

The parameters of the investigation were drawn broadly to also include any other utility whose actions may have affected storm recovery efforts, specifically citing telecommunications company AT&T Inc. and Missouri American Water Co.

"The fact is we've got a lot of people without electricity," said PSC chairman Jeff Davis, "and that's the overwhelming concern here."

About 600,000 Ameren customers lost power in Missouri and Illinois -- most in the St. Louis area -- because of the July 19 and July 21 storms, said Ameren spokesman Mike Cleary. By Thursday, about 38,000 remained without power in the two states, including 34,000 in the St. Louis area, he said.

PSC staff already had begun looking into Ameren's storm preparations and response, which it does routinely after major power outages. By opening a formal investigation, the five-member commission highlighted the importance of the case and provided a way for big electricity consumers such as businesses and local governments to become involved.

It set an Aug. 27 deadline for the investigation report.

"As regulators, I think that's what the public expects them to do," Cleary said. "But we're confident their investigation will conclude that we did everything we could, when you consider the amount of devastation we had to put up with."

Commissioner Connie Murray cast the lone dissent, claiming the formal investigation "was all for show" and that the staff's normal review should have sufficed.

"I think it is purely being done for the purpose of making us look like we're doing something," Murray said.

But commissioner Robert Clayton said the formal investigation was "critically important" to establish a public record of the utilities' efforts. Noting St. Louis has suffered significant power outages each of the past few years, Clayton said the investigation should explore whether that's a mere meteorological coincidence or partially the result of poor infrastructure design and maintenance.

Commission Steve Gaw also demanded answers about whether individual customers who lost power -- and thus lost refrigerated food -- can get a reduction on future bills.

PSC executive director Wess Henderson said investigators aren't necessarily looking for a reason to file a regulatory complaint against Ameren.

"Our main goal is to go in and see what worked in this storm -- because it was so big -- and what didn't, and to get procedures in place to fix what didn't," Henderson said.

The PSC undertook informal investigations into Ameren each of the past two years, after storms knocked out power to around 220,000 customers in 2004 and again in 2005.

Among other things, the 2004 report recommended Ameren take immediate steps to reduce a backlog in its tree trimming around power lines. In November 2004, Ameren committed to a 27 percent increase in its tree-trimming budget, spending about $30 million annually to try to eliminate the backlog by Dec. 31, 2008.

Ameren senior vice president Richard Mark defended Ameren's recovery efforts this year at a news conference Thursday with St. Louis County Executive Charles Dooley. He denied that tree trimming programs contributed to the outage.

"Tree trimming is not going to stop a natural disaster," Mark said. "I don't know of anything we can do to stop trees from being uprooted, split in half."

The 2005 report said Ameren's call center operators did a good job of responding to what was then a record number of calls -- 278,860 in the five days after the storm.

The company's call centers had received 705,638 calls from July 19 through Wednesday, Cleary said. During that time, Ameren's Internet site had 300,000 visits -- more than double the total for the entire month of June. The company added another Web server July 20 to try to handle the demand, he said.

Some residents of north St. Louis County have complained about the recovery, believing that wealthier neighborhoods had power restored first. But Dooley said north county residents were treated properly.

"Both storms hit north county the worst -- that's a fact," he said. Ameren "is doing everything they can do to get power back on."