Model predicts power outages

Generators whine into the night. Dirty clothes get put back on. Showers are cold. For most people, the worst part of living through a hurricane is losing power for days or weeks.

Not to worry, there's an app for that.

An environmental engineer and a climatologist have designed a computer modeling program to predict where a hurricane making landfall will cause power outages. That sort of information would allow utilities to pre-position repair crews and equipment more accurately and bring in more crews as needed, ideally getting the power turned back on quicker.

"Absolutely" that could help, said Trish Freshwater, public affairs coordinator with South Carolina Electric & Gas.

There are, as you might expect, a few hitches. The biggest one might be that the more lead time a utility can get the better. But the model depends on an accurate forecast of just where the storm will land. Even with improvements to hurricane modelling, landfall is rarely determined much more than 48 hours in advance.

The next hitch is that the model was designed for Gulf state utilities using a fairly rich data set from storms that caused power outages. Whether it would work in the Lowcountry depends on whether emergency managers could provide good enough data to support the modelling, said Seth Guikema, a Johns Hopkins University environmental engineering professor, who helped design it.

In the Lowcountry, there have been far fewer storms causing widespread damage to feed data from.

The third hitch is, well, nobody's really had a chance to field test the model yet. The storm season has been so quiet that only one marginal tropical storm made landfall so far. It formed offshore the day before it hit, so quickly that the utilities couldn't run the model.

"We're really curious how this model will work," Guikema said.

When a storm threatens, utilities have to weigh the cost of pre-positioning crews and equipment across a wide swath of coast against the potential for damage from the storm. Not surprisingly, they tend to over- or under-compensate. The model, designed by Guikema and Texas A&M professor Steven Quiring, helps narrow the odds.

How big a difference it would make "depends on how the utility is making decisions now," Guikema said.

SCE&G, the utility that provides electricity for much of the Charleston area, tailors its preparation for each hurricane individually, Freshwater said. The company already uses a number of predictability models to prepare for any kind of disaster, as well as lessons learned from previous crises.

"It would be easy to hedge decisions based on what happened in the last storm," she said. But being under-prepared for a storm can be more expensive than pre-positioning for a storm that doesn't do as much damage, so the company generally tends toward being a little over-prepared. "It's going to cost us either way."

If the researchers' model works, she said, "It could be another model to add to our mix."

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.