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City, Utilities, Look At Lessons Learned After December Ice Storm

EWEB Facebook page

Eugene residents are still cleaning up from the ice storm in December which downed hundreds of trees and put 22-thousand households in the dark. This week, the city is hosting a debrief on lessons learned.

  

  Many Eugene households were without power for more than a week after the storm.

EWEB’s Jeanine Parisi says because the majority of the outages were in Eugene, teams from other utilities were able to help EWEB crews restore power.

“I think we felt pretty good about just our commitment to our core purpose." Parisi says, "This is a place where your mission gets really clear and everyone pulled together for a common goal.”

Parisi says EWEB’s outage line was completely overwhelmed. She says they were flying blind when it comes to keeping track of outages and they need to improve the technology.

“That system is old and it really doesn’t serve us well when it comes to an outage of this size." Parisi says, '"Because, like I said, we were just flying blind.”

Parisi says she looks forward to hearing from other agencies about lessons learned. She says the idea is to be better prepared for a future disaster, whether it’s a weather event, earthquake or wildfire.

The Public presentation on lessons learned from the December 2016 ice storm is Wednesday afternoon (Feb. 8) from 2:30 to 4 at EWEB Headquarters.

 

Rachael McDonald is KLCC’s host for All Things Considered on weekday afternoons. She also is the editor of the KLCC Extra, the daily digital newspaper. Rachael has a BA in English from the University of Oregon. She started out in public radio as a newsroom volunteer at KLCC in 2000.
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