A frozen branch on Newport Mill Road in Kensington on Friday morning. (Patrick D. Witty — For The Washington Post)

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 16, 1999; Page A01

The first loud pop, green flash and burning smell came before 4 a.m. somewhere in frozen central Montgomery County. Within an hour, it was like fireworks: Ice-encrusted limbs were crashing onto power lines, causing spectacular short circuits. Transformer fuses popped like psychedelic flashbulbs in the pitch black before dawn in dozens of neighborhoods.

The beginning of one of the area's worst power outages looked like a suburban aurora borealis.

"The whole sky was lit up green," said Joan Mancuso, a nursery school teacher who lives near Rockville and was awakened by the sound of falling limbs and looked outside. "It was like green fireworks all over the western horizon."

Robert Grantley, the Potomac Electric Power Co. executive in charge of power distribution, was asleep in his Fort Washington home when the phone rang before 5 a.m. yesterday. A member of his staff gave a report: This was going to be serious.

Not only were trees dropping onto hundreds of wires serving neighborhoods, but the critical 69,000-volt transmission lines that feed power to substations were being hit. A single substation serves as many as 25,000 customers.

Grantley, a 20-year veteran, knew that losing even one substation was rare. Yet this ice storm knocked out 11 substations -- the most damage caused by ice in Pepco's 102-year history.

Crises like these test the mettle of a power company, but even the regular drills run to prepare for outage disasters could not have anticipated destruction so widespread and overwhelming. Though Pepco officials said everything went according to plan yesterday, lights were still dark for 178,000 customers when evening fell.

"We have plans in place to deal with this," Grantley said. "It's a matter of going out and doing what we practice."

Customer service operators struggled throughout the day to field the trickle -- then the torrent -- of customer calls. Extra crews were standing by, and they were dispatched to trouble spots, until the number of downed wires overwhelmed them. A cry for reinforcements went out to power companies in other states.

By late morning, Pepco said, 158 two-person crews were out repairing lines. On a normal day, 10 crews are working.

An additional 85 crews from other power companies were hurrying to the area from North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia.

Customer calls poured into Pepco's phone center in the headquarters at 1900 Pennsylvania Ave. A sophisticated computer program logged the calls and made a preliminary prediction of the cause of the outages, and Pepco said the information was transmitted to a secret control center -- the company won't divulge the location for security reasons -- in the Rockville area.

Crews were dispatched according to a rigid priority system, according to Pepco. First priority was snuffing out any live wires on the ground reported by customers.

Next was repairing lines in the order that would restore power to the most customers.

The 69,000-volt transmission lines that feed the substations had to be taken care of first. The company has 135 substations serving the region. The 11 off-line substations were all in Montgomery County. Each substation is served by two or three 69,000-volt lines, and all must go down to darken the substation. That meant as many as 33 of the high-voltage wires had to be fixed, and many had more than one break.

As the substations came back to life, crews were sent to repair the multiple feeder lines that connect the substations to transformers in neighborhoods. Then they focused on the wires reaching individual houses.

Outages of long duration aren't unknown. At Christmastime, some residents of central Virginia went without power for more than a week. And even utilities in serious snow country get rocked by ice. A year ago, 600,000 electric customers in Maine -- representing about 57 percent of the state's population -- lost power to the same storm that left 2 million Canadians without electricity.

Pepco's best effort left many customers grumbling in the dark as night arrived. Some complained that Pepco shouldn't be vulnerable to such massive outages, and they said it shouldn't take so long to fix the problem. Why couldn't the big transmission lines be placed underground, out of the reach of the weather?

Grantley said it would be prohibitively expensive to bury the 69,000-volt lines, and he said even power companies in states farther north do not do that. Since the 1960s, by law, power lines serving new individual subdivisions must be placed underground, and Pepco does so, he said.

The task of piecing the system back together yesterday fell to men and women like Brian Miles. He is the foreman of a crew under contract to Pepco, a 20-year veteran who worked his way up from "grunt" because he loves the unpredictable challenges of the work. This was the worst damage he'd ever seen from ice.

Around noon, he was directing about eight men to fix a major disruption of three 69,000-volt lines on Saul Road in Kensington. Next the crew had more breaks in the same high-voltage wire to fix, and then more wires to check out. "We'll get 'em on as soon as we can," Miles said.

They expected to be working until midnight and knew there still would be more to do.

In the meantime, customers made do. Mancuso said the temperature had dropped to 55 degrees in her house, but fortunately she has a wood-burning stove in the family room. She and her sister and mother were planning to book a room in a hotel last night, or stay with friends in Takoma Park.