The resulting power outages left a record 3.2 million Florida Power & Light customers without power. It wasn’t until Nov. 11 before most customers’ power was restored.

Soon the southern half of Florida was divided into the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’: those who had onsite alternate power to operate their businesses and personal lives and those who did not.

Florida Power & Light produces electricity at 14 sites and delivers it through a system of 700,000 miles of overhead and underground transmission and distribution lines and more than one million poles.

While it was critical that hospitals, fire and rescue and police operations got back on line quickly, it also was important the school system get up and running.

“In order to get the community back in operation, you’ve got to get the schools opened,” notes Jerry Graziose, safety director for the Broward County School District, the nation’s sixth-largest.

School was out for two weeks as a result of the power outages, which affected 98 percent of the county. Meanwhile, the school district encountered a $390,000 food loss, a loss expected to be covered by FEMA.

When the school system has even one unanticipated day off, the ripple effects are widespread.

The school system is Broward County’s largest employer with more than 30,000 full-time employees serving more than 270,000 students. Graziose’s department inspects 319 district facilities, of which 240 are schools.

While school district employees were still getting paid, many parents who typically work while their children are in school faced the challenge of child care, as day care centers were without power as well.

After the hurricane, officials from the school system and Florida Power & Light met to work out a restoration plan. The power company was restoring power at selected priority locations; not all schools were in the priority grid.

Another concern was sending 1,400 buses out into a community with inoperative traffic lights—it also was a safety issue for children walking to school as well as parents driving children to school.

And with no operative gas station pumps, there was an inability to access gasoline to provide transportation.

Meanwhile, the school district worked to ensure that its 36 schools serving as hurricane shelters for displaced people were operational.

In 1994, the Broward County School District became the first in the state to design hurricane shelters in its schools; five years later, it became a statewide requirement.

All school shelters have generators that provide power for 72 hours. Of the district’s 240 schools, 186 have generators designed to run for 24 hours and operate the fire alarm system, the intercom system, telephone service, emergency lighting, and the walk-in freezers and coolers in the school cafeteria.

Generators at shelter schools provide all of that plus outlets for TV sets. They also operate ice makers, lighting systems, a ventilation system, and rest room pumps. The shelter generators range from 60 kW to 300 kW.

The special needs shelter has even more features, with electrical outlets in the shelter area to keep medical equipment operative.

The Broward School District has a five-year plan to add generators at schools that get replaced or at sites that have none. Additionally, there are existing schools where generators are being upgraded because they are too small or too old to do an appropriate job.

The newer generators will enable schools to be self-sufficient for 72 hours.

The school district also has a generator the size of a mobile home, used to go to different sites as needed.

“With 1,750 kW, it will run an entire school with air conditioning,” says Graziose. “We can’t transport it with fuel—you’ve got to take it to a site, fuel it and then before you move it you’ve got to take the fuel out. We have to get a police escort when we move it. It’s a tractor-trailer with two doors; you walk in it.”

Getting a fuel truck is the biggest lesson the school district learned from Hurricane Wilma.

“We have found out we have to be self-sufficient,” Graziose says. “We have small fuel trucks we send out to schools. We could take diesel from our lot and fill the diesel generators, but we were limited because of the size. We are looking at getting a larger fuel truck so we can handle more generators at a faster rate than taking care of one generator and coming back to refuel.”

Because the school district made fuel preparations before the storm, it had plenty of gasoline and diesel to share with municipalities, hospitals, nursing homes and fire and police departments.

“Before each hurricane season, we work to make sure the generators are completely fueled and checked,” Graziose says. “We tried to get as many fuel deliveries to our lots as possible before the storm and then working with state agencies’ tracker system, we were able to get companies to deliver fuel right after the storm as we were giving it out so we wouldn’t run out of fuel or if we did, it was just for a short period of time as they were reloading.”

Back-up energy is critical not just during a hurricane, but for daily power outages that can occur, Graziose notes.

“Having the generators in the schools in many cases allows the school to continue to operate,” he says.

“That’s the key issue—to be able to operate in an emergency. We take our back-up generators to a school if a generator goes down in a school for maintenance or power goes down. Our goal is to try to keep them in power. Our goal is to keep kids in school.”

After Hurricane Wilma hit and Floridians began losing the contents of their refrigerators and freezers in the wake of the power outage, many flocked to their local grocery stores, such as Publix Super Markets, the nation’s largest and fastest-growing employee owned supermarket chain.

Publix stores have back-up generators—with sizes varying according to each store’s square footage—that in most instances will allow stores to come back on line with partial power, notes Maria Brous, director of media and community relations.

“In addition, we have a limited number of gen-set units that allow our stores the opportunity to be up and operational through the entire store,” she says.

Thus, some people were shopping in reduced lighting from a reduced inventory—minus such items as dairy products—while others stood in long lines to get into fully operational stores for what would be coveted items as fresh food.

Brous says the supermarket chain’s own losses were still being evaluated. What may offset that is the “mad dash” for supplies before the storm hits.

“Prior to the storm, customers are stocking up on needed supplies,” Brous says. “If there is an extended period of time power shortage, customers need to discard and replenish their inventories. Publix has to do the same.”

And while a particular store may be up and running, the store’s suppliers may not.

“Prior to the storm and directly following it, suppliers are limited in their access to storm areas,” she says.

“This case was illustrated during the hurricane season of 2004, when suppliers were unable to enter and exit the state for several weeks.”

Jay Shearouse, a senior vice president with Fidelity Federal Bank & Trust in West Palm Beach, woke up the morning after Hurricane Wilma hit to find the bank’s 48 branches were without power.

“We were unable to open any of them safely,” he says. “As the next few days went on, we were able to bring more online. We were greatly affected, as were most businesses.”

Most branches didn’t get back online until power was restored.

“We have some locations with generator back-up and obviously we are implementing generators into our strategy even more so now, as are most businesses,” Shearouse says.

Shearouse says Fidelity Federal has onsite generator power at several facilities, including its corporate headquarters in West Palm Beach, with a generator exceeding 100 kW. While it doesn’t run the air-conditioner, it provides for emergency lighting and powers the bank’s computer systems.

The bank also owns a 70 kW trailer generator and is ordering a number of 55 kW generators.

“At our operations center, where we do our data processing and check processing, we have onsite power and fuel as well,” he says, adding the generator is 250 kW. “The branches that were slowly coming on line with power were able to access our network and serve our customers as normal.”

Two factors drive the aftermath of an outage at the banks, Shearhouse notes.

“One is power and the other is communication, which has power associated to it,” he says. “Without communication, we can’t access our databases or run transactions effectively. The other issue of communication and power is security, and that presents a safety issue as well. Then there’s the old issue that without power you don’t have lights and air-conditioning, and that makes things brutal sometimes in south Florida.”

The bank’s customers had their own problems.

“Every business is dramatically affected when they don’t have power,” Shearouse says. He cites the restaurant industry as an example.

“They have inventory that is refrigerated, and when they lose power they lose refrigeration,” he says. “Some of these restaurants are not that big and are losing anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 in inventory, which is a tremendous hit on a small business.”

Shearouse says there were customers at the bank’s doors the morning after the storm saying they had problems and needed help.

“We strategically planned for how we can help our customers through emergency loans or deferment of payments to help them get back on their feet,” he says. “Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t pay attention to their insurance coverage. Business interruption insurance is a classic example. In the example of the restaurant, they face these big deductibles and then they are not serving customers and not making money on top of everything else.”

Part of the bank’s strategy is to purchase generators capable of running a branch in total.

“We are purchasing mobile fuel trailers and they are being maintained and stored by a third-party vendor,” he says. “After the hurricane comes, we can move those generators around as we need to. You just drive up, plug it in and get your branch running. When Florida Power & Light gets that branch up, we unplug it and take it to another region that needs service.”

Having onsite fuel for the generators is important, given that gas stations aren’t operative because of power outages.

“We’re letting some of people in our community know we have fuel supplies,” says Shearouse. “We also have some special loan programs on the consumer side for people who want to put generators in their homes.

“On the commercial side—particularly our two target areas of restaurants and gas stations—we’ve put together a program to finance onsite generators. Our big problem during Hurricane Wilma was getting gas after the storm. The gas was here, the power was out. If they had onsite generators to fuel the pumps, then we’d have been in a lot better shape.”

Following Hurricane Wilma, people started to realize how important it is to get back into business, Shearouse notes.

“I noticed several restaurants that had onsite generators big enough to run everything and their places were packed,” he says. “They had more sales than they’ve ever had in their life.”

While many businesses were down for the duration of their power outage, Southeastern Printing in Stuart, FL—one of the Southeast’s largest full house graphic communication companies—was up and running servicing its customers the next day.

The 81-year-old company learned from weathering three direct-impact hurricanes in a 13-month span starting in 2004 that a disaster recovery plan was essential.

Company management evaluated its existing plan before Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne emerged that year; the keystone of the plan is renting emergency generators.

When Hurricane Frances hit the area in September 2004, Southeastern—which sustained structural and water damage—brought in generators for its pre-press operations and by the fourth day after the storm, all presses were running at full capacity.

Following that, Hurricane Jeanne hit, and within three weeks the company found itself in the midst of two major hurricanes, yet through its planning managed to produce an annual report by partnering with a bindery company in Buffalo.

When Hurricane Wilma came calling on Oct. 24, Southeastern lost power again. With backup generators in place the following day, Southeastern had enough power to run its entire fleet of sheet-fed and flexo presses and bindery equipment.

Employees were implementing their respective work flow processes to meet scheduled delivery dates, notes Joanie Lotze, marketing manager.

“By undergoing adversity and a learning curve the previous year, Southeastern survived the consequences of Hurricane Wilma with barely a hitch,” she says.

The North Broward Hospital District—consisting of four medical centers and other sites—went on generator power early into the storm as a precautionary measure to ensure there were no interruptions. The district had enough generator fuel to last up to 10 days in each of its facilities.

The district’s Department of Emergency Preparedness is the only one of its kind for a hospital in the state. Its director, Jeanne Eckes-Roper, explains that’s because it’s a full-time department dedicated to emergency preparedness, whereas at other hospitals, it may be part of somebody else’s job.

Eckes-Roper also points out the program is unique in that clinicians operate the department with support from safety and security departments.

“We look at all hazards and are responsible for the response and recovery aspects for all of our medical centers in our hospital system to make sure we are going to remain functional at all time,” she says. “The services we provide to our community are mission-critical, so we want to make sure we’re ready to go if something should ever happen.”

That readiness is based in 17 generators spread throughout the system, ranging in kW power from 250 to 5,000.

Eckes-Roper says the district’s facilities management department tests the generators on a monthly basis to make sure that in the event of a power outage, the hospitals can come up on generator power quickly without interruption of service.

“That has certainly proved well because our generators did not fail during the storm,” she says. “We maintained the appropriate fuel levels for our generators to remain functional at all times.”

The hospital’s fully-functional status served a community that also was dealing with its own power-related issues.

There were some injuries and deaths related to improper use of generators, such as carbon monoxide poisoning and someone who burned himself by checking on a generator’s fuel level with a candle.

While the hospital itself was prepared, it still operated in an environment with other challenges, such as spotty landline and cell phone service. When employees couldn’t be reached by phone, the district reached out to them through Internet messages, news broadcasts and house checks.

During the two weeks school was out, the hospital district offered onsite child care. It also offered its employees rides, given residents’ inability to access gas pumps.

“We made sure those impacted greatly by the storm were put up in safe places if their homes were damaged or destroyed,” she says.

“We had our employee assistance program and crisis teams in place to assist our employees with any potential physical and psychological needs that may have arisen as a result of the storm. In the health care field, we are not only the safety net for the community—we have to make sure the needs of our employees were taken care of so they could meet the community needs.”

The hospitals fed their employees for the first week; they were also given food and water to take home to their families. The district makes sure it has enough food, water and fuel to last 10 days.

And though the district has its own emergency plan, some of its suppliers do not. To address that, the district maintains a five-day supply of medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. The district also conserved linens as the supplier had no energy for his own business for several days.

“We have alternate suppliers,” Eckes-Roper notes. “You cannot rely on just one individual vendor for a particular thing, especially in a storm where the disaster could cover miles.”

Hurricane Wilma proved to the hospital district that it’s important to test generators and follow a plan, Eckes-Roper says.

“Every time there is a disaster anywhere in the country, we look at lessons learned from those events and make sure we’ve addressed some of those issues,” she says. “Every disaster is different.”

Roberto Zegarra can attest to that. As managing director for business continuity in the Miami offices of Telefonica, the world’s second largest telecommunications systems provider, he oversees a state-of-the-art data back-up center.

“Companies lose millions of dollars when they have an outage,” notes Zegarra.

Zegarra also teaches for the Disaster Recovery Institute, an organization outside of Washington D.C. that certifies individuals in business continuity.

It’s important not only to have generators, but an uninterrupted power system (UPS) to ensure one’s business has electricity all the time, says Zegarra.

Merely having back-up systems is not sufficient, he points out. A business must maintain them.

“If you put $100,000 into a large generator system and you completely forget about it, you can be in dire straits,” Zegarra points out.

Case in point: During Hurricane Wilma, Telefonica’s data center, which operates with three large generators offering 70 hours of capacity apiece, ensured it had sufficient diesel supplies prior to the storm.

But some of the business’ neighbors did not and wanted to buy diesel from Telefonica.

“Telefonica is not Exxon, so we had to say ‘no’; obviously our clients needed to be taken care of,” Zegarra says. “We didn’t sell them any diesel but they came in to our site and were operational. We didn’t lose a beat because we had UPS systems and three large permanent generators.”

The generators are tested each week and fueled daily.

“Everybody in south Florida is worried about hurricanes, but 30 to 40 percent of power outages are operational,” Zegarra points out, adding the cause could be faulty equipment design, lack of maintenance or faulty power line design.

From 2000 to 2004, storms and hurricanes accounted for less than 12 percent of power outages. But Hurricane Wilma packed a punch nonetheless with widespread, long-term power outages.

“They’re not huge worries elsewhere, but they are huge worries for us here and it’s important to take some measures,” says Zegarra. He believes the power company needs to place electrical lines underground throughout the state, as in the case of Naples, FL.

“Naples suffered less compared to what happened in Miami because the power lines are mostly underground and that made a big difference,” he says.

The flip side of losing money during power outages is making more money when a business has onsite backup power.

Clients that were up and running through Telefonica’s site reported their competitors were desperate because their clients were calling them.

“If you are up and running, you are the only game in town,” Zegarra points out. “People get desperate and the ones that are operational need to fill in the base, strengthen their name and image and show they are a reliable company.”

Zegarra cites a University of Oxford study conducted prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks showing major companies that weathered crises in the 1990s saw their stock value rise if they were operational through the crisis.

“Investors look at these companies and say, ‘If these guys have their act together now, I can trust this company with my money’,” Zegarra points out.

Zegarra echoes the importance of companies ensuring their supply chains can be operational during a crisis.

“You need alternate suppliers and you need to work with your suppliers so that you are running and they are running, because it doesn’t help to have power and your supplier is not running,” he says.

Phone communications also are important. Cordless phones and cell phones may not work, but old-fashioned corded ones will, Zegarra points out.

Telefonica got a tremendous demand to use its facilities in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma. “Obviously, that was good for our business, but we want to help clients prepare for the next time,” Zegarra says.

CAROL BRZOZOWSKI is a journalist living in Coral Springs, FL.

DE - May/June 2006