Morris Twp. To Tell JCP&L What it Thinks of Irene Response

JCP&L representatives can expect an earful when Morris Township officials meet with them and members of the Board of Public Utilities Sept. 27 at a special hearing at the Morris County Public Safety Academy on West Hanover Avenue in Morris Plains.

The three-hour public hearing beginning at 4 p.m. will be to address the "state of preparedness and responsiveness of JCP&L and other electric distribution companies prior to, during and after Hurricane Irene," according to a memorandum issued by the township last week.

Residents can send in their comments and questions by email to board.secretary@bpu.state.nj.us or in person at the township offices.

While there were many trees down, the primary concern is the flooding at the substation on Abbett Avenue in Morristown close to Ridgedale Avenue. JCP&L built a wall around the substation after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, but the "blockages of the Whippany River just up the street from their substation caused more severe flooding than was engineered for," Morris Township Mayor H. Scott Rosenbush said at a township committee meeting Wednesday. “Clearly the wall’s not high enough.“

The result was . Some residents were out for ten days, Rosenbush added.

Rosenbush and others said they want to know what JCP&L plans for the future.

The company tried to "jerry rig" customers on to other grids, but "ultimately they were not able to move those customers off of that Morristown substation," he said.

To make matters more frustrating, communication about what was happening was poor, he said.

"They need to be open and transparent and let us know what their game plan is," instead of "not calling you back and not showing up when you say you will,." said Committeeman Daniel Caffrey.

At the Wednesday meeting, the committee voted to move $500,000 from surplus to address costs associated with Hurricane Irene, even though officials eventually expect to recover some of those costs through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The cost of damage has been estimated for now at the same amount—even though the $300,000 spent to shore up Lake Valley Road has not been added to that tally, which OEM director Harvey Klein expects to rise much higher. Township workers trucked in rock and stone to rebuild a bank of a stream that “threatened to wash out the road,” said Rosenbush. The flooding occurred between Mill Road and Tracy Court.

Klein also urged residents to register with FEMA online. He said the agency's Disaster Recovery Center has been set up in the building in Parsippany.

“The FEMA response has been very good,” Klein said.

Although the committee had many complaints, Committeeman Raymond L. Snyder said he wasn’t "ready to throw Jersey Central under the bus yet. I want people to remember this was a hurricane,"—a hurricane that hit the entire state of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. “We had catastrophic problems with this hurricane."

He recalled the substation on Abbett Avenue flooded 30 years ago “and almost nothing could be done until the water subsided.”