"It was transformational in every way for all of us," said Rodney Blevins, Dominion Virginia Power's vice president for distribution operations.
In the widespread scope of its impact, the 2003 storm was the worst natural disaster Virginia has ever sustained, said Michael Cline, the state's coordinator of emergency management.
Isabel hit Virginia on Sept. 18-19, 2003, and left in its wake more than 2 million electricity customers without power, $1.6 billion in property damage, 36 storm-related fatalities, and more than 10,400 damaged or destroyed homes and businesses.
Simply clearing away the debris took 660,000 dump-truck loads.
Isabel produced the greatest wind and storm surge in the region since Hurricane Hazel in 1954 and the 1933 Chesapeake-Potomac hurricane, according to the National Weather Service's Wakefield office.
"Isabel will also be remembered for the most extensive power outages ever in Virginia," the weather service said, "and permanent change to the landscape from all the fallen trees and storm surge."
For most Virginians -- about 80 percent of the state -- those crippling power outages were Isabel's immediate impact on their lives.
For Dominion Virginia Power, the state's largest electric company with 2.3 million subscribers, "the scale of the restoration effort was far greater than anything we'd faced before," said Blevins, who is responsible for the utility's storm response.
Before Isabel's rampage, the company focused storm restoration efforts on getting its own customers back on line. "Our mindset changed after that," Blevins said. "Now it's, 'How can we minimize the effect of severe weather on citizens?'"
Among the steps utility and emergency managers have taken as a result of Isabel are:
- heightening the coordination of public and private responses to natural and man-made catastrophes;
- identifying and prioritizing the critical public and community services in each locality;
- providing better information on the status of power restoration;
- emphasizing early damage assessment to better target repairs; and
- improving mutual aid arrangements among utilities and public agencies.
Winds reached 107 mph at Gwynn's Island in Mathews County, the weather service reported.
However, Blevins said, "it's not 'that the wind's blowing.' It's 'what the wind's blowing.' " Said Cline, "The big impact was from trees falling and the root balls they created."
While Isabel poured 10.6 inches of rain on Toano in James City County and 6.7 inches on Midlothian in Chesterfield County, the ground in Virginia was already saturated when the storm hit, making thousands of trees easily susceptible to being yanked from the soft soil by the widespread tropical storm-force winds.
Wind-thrown trees brought down power lines, and their root balls pulled up water lines and ripped up roadbeds, Cline said. Fallen trees and flooding rains blocked hundreds of roads across the state.
Before Isabel, Dominion Virginia Power knew which of its electric customers were critically important for public life and safety -- such facilities as medical centers, water pumping stations, military and homeland security installations, major telecommunication switching stations, emergency operation centers and gas stations. But the company could not quickly check its outage management system to find out which critical facilities were without power in order to focus repairs on them.
"We were doing it manually during the event," Blevins said.
Today, Dominion Virginia Power can use its customer information system to determine which vital community facilities have lost power, he said, and target crews where they are most needed.
"I can look at it live, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and tell what's out and what's online," Blevins said, "whether a crew's been assigned, whether there's a restoration time" set.
Isabel strained relations between state government and Virginia's largest utility.
State officials initially distanced themselves from the gargantuan power outage. Though the government does not run the power system, Virginians looked to the governor and state officials for help in the outage.
"What we learned out of that was that our success was interconnected," Blevins said. "We all had to work at it, and we had to be coordinated."
Dominion Virginia Power, for its part, was not eager to tell the public how long it was going to be until their lights, air conditioners and refrigerators would come on again. More than a week went by after Isabel hit before many Dominion Virginia Power customers had power restored.
Being transparent with its customers and public officials about storm restoration information has become a priority for the utility, even if the company has to say it's going to be an uncomfortably long time, Blevins said.
"The exchange of information in the field is just better now," Cline said.
Isabel tops the list of Dominion Virginia Power's worst storms, with 1.8 million customers out of service. Getting electricity turned back on for all the company's subscribers took 15 days, the longest restoration effort in the utility's history.
Thanks to Isabel, Dominion Virginia Power used up a year's supply of poles, cross arms and transformers in just 10 days, and about four years' worth of other materials, such as wire and insulators: 10,700 power poles, 14,600 pole cross arms, 13,000 spans of wire and 7,900 transformers.
Isabel damaged about 1,000 miles of the company's distribution lines and affected more than 60 percent of its thousands of miles of distribution circuits. The storm spawned more than 57,000 work locations across the utility's 30,000-square-mile service area.
Dominion Virginia Power called on more than 12,000 workers -- including utility crews from 22 states and Canada -- for the service restoration push. Of that number, 7,000 were the utility's own employees, including 2,700 who normally were office workers.
"Isabel was a full-fledged system restoration," Blevins said.
The storm also whacked the state's member-owned electric cooperatives. About 255,000 co-op subscribers lost power because of Isabel, said Mary Howell, manager of member and public relations with the Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives. Getting power back to rural co-op members took weeks.
Isabel shut down two of the local power distribution co-ops: Prince George Electric Cooperative in Waverly and Community Electric Cooperative in Windsor.
"They literally did not have a single member that did not lose power," Howell said.
In 2013 alone, Dominion Virginia Power is spending more than $180 million for reliability improvements that will help in present-day storms, everything from rebuilding substations and reconditioning electrical circuits to replacing switches and trimming trees and brush.
"After Isabel, there was a major effort, a huge effort, to cut trees back from power lines," Cline said.
"Targeted investment in strategic undergrounding provides the most cost-effective improvements in reliability," Blevins said.
While no decision has been made on the proposal, "undergrounding 20 percent of the worst-performing tap lines could reduce by 63 percent the amount of work required to repair the outage events caused by major storms," Blevins said.
The power company prepares for natural disasters year-round, he said, coordinating with state and local emergency partners and assigning a commander to manage high-profile events.
"We're not just sitting around waiting for the next one," Blevins said. "We're doing things to make sure we're better the next time at executing the restoration plan."
"Disasters will never stop happening," Cline said. But, he said, "in the last 10 years, we've made tremendous progress."
This article was originally published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
