Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - During the Buffalo Blizzard last year Christmas Weekend, National Grid experienced something at three of their substations in the city that had never happened with past storms. The company saw snow get into transformer bays, which are open-air by design, but surrounded by brick walls and fencing.
"What ended up happening last year was snow started penetrating through the fencing because of the amount of snow and the duration of the wind that we saw. Those two, in combination, started blowing snow into the transformer bays, and when the snow became too much, our equipment sensed an abnormal condition and tripped itself offline, similar to what a breaker or a fuse in your house would do," said Ken Kujawa, WNY Regional Director at National Grid in an interview with WBEN on Thursday.
While it was a first-time circumstance with snow causing the substations to, essentially, shut down, Kujawa and others at National Grid realized they needed to have a permanent solution in place to prevent it from happening again.
"We want to do this so that our customers can be confident that we can provide them with safe and reliable power," Kujawa said.
The solution: Installing new louver system fencing at the substations across the City of Buffalo to better protect the transformer bays from the elements.
"The louver system looks like blinds in your house, they're at a 45 degree angle. There was a grate in front of them, but what that'll do is add extra protection for each transformer bay so if we have the same conditions that we had during last December's blizzard, the station bays should be protected and we won't see snow get in," Kujawa explained. "If that situation is avoided, then the power will remain on for our customers."
A total of eight substations across the city are currently being worked on to replace the old fencing with the new louver system fencing. That work is expected to continue over the coming weeks and months, and be completed before the end of the first quarter of 2024.
Once those substations are completed, then all 43 substations operated by National Grid in the City of Buffalo will be protected with a louver system.
The project, itself, is costing National Grid a little over $1 million, but Kujawa believes the money coming out of their operations and maintenance budget is very well spent
"Looking at what we saw last year and after doing our After Action Review, in terms of what should we be looking at going forward, we realized we don't have the luxury of saying, 'Well, it was a once in a generation storm. We don't have to worry about it again.' If it happened once, chances are we're going to see it again," Kujawa said. "It may not be this year, but it may be two years or three years down the road. But if it comes, we have to be ready for it. So the louver systems give us the ultimate layer of protection that we feel we need in order to keep our transformer base protected.
"We believe it's going to provide us the protection our equipment needs so that if we get another blizzard forecast, we'll be fine. It took a blizzard forecast for that event to happen. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the November storm last year. When that storm happened, we didn't have any issues. We were fine, our stations performed fine. But the December blizzard was different because of the wind and the snow for as long of a duration as it occurred. That's what we have to prepare ourselves for going forward."
National Grid likes to pride itself on the job the company does leading up to a storm. With up-to-date weather forecasts three times a day, the company is able to analyze the weather, and bring in and pre-position crews in advance of a potential storm to hit the ground running in response to an outage event.
However, Kujawa admits the December blizzard did present some unique challenges.
Not only did we face the issue with the stations, but access, being able to drive down the streets in the City of Buffalo and Erie County, for that matter, became a challenge because of the plowing challenges that we faced, just given the amount of snow that we had," he said. "But we worked really well with the city, county, state in coordinating our efforts to let them know where we needed to get to in order to restore power. Our crews needed to get to this street because there was a broken pole or wires down. So we were letting the city, county and state know where we needed to get to, and then they coordinated their palling activities in order to get us the access that we needed.
"Now that we've experienced what we did last December, I think we all know what we need to do and what we need to have in place in order to be ready if we have another blizzard forecast."