The resignation of Mike Hervey, the embattled chief executive of the Long Island Power Authority, ended for the moment the brutal headlines and fierce attacks on the utility from New York’s elected officials. At first glance, Hervey’s exit seems to follow a familiar narrative: a company stumbles badly in a crisis and the CEO is forced out. But it wasn’t LIPA’s struggle to turn on the lights that sealed Hervey’s doom. It was bad communication.
Most customers understood that the size and severity of Superstorm Sandy meant it would take more time than usual to recover. This wasn’t a summer thunderstorm, after all. But what customers could not understand – or tolerate quietly – was getting little or no information from utility companies.
And by that measure, LIPA’s response was a failure. Its call center operators, outage maps, twitter account and press officials were either unresponsive or uninformed. No utility company in the region got high marks for its crisis communications but most eventually managed to get relevant information on outages and restoration times to their customers, and several made an effort to visibly engage the media. Not LIPA.
Ironically, LIPA’s work crews did a good job. Their pace of power restoration tracked that of other utilities in the region that were devastated by Sandy. After six days, LIPA said
it had restored service to 80 percent of the 1 million customers who lost power. That progress was similar to PSE&G in New Jersey, which had 1.2 million customers without power, and Con Edison, which had 1.1 million customer outages.
Overall, the recovery effort by power companies in the region were in line with those of other utilities following major disasters. According to an analysis by the Associated Press:
“…on the whole, the response to Sandy by utility companies, especially in hardest-hit New York and New Jersey, was typical – or even a little faster than elsewhere after other huge storms.”
So while LIPA’s response on the ground was pretty good under the circumstances, its response everywhere else – media relations, customer service, pubic information, community affairs – was terrible.
Good leaders make sure their organizations can communicate in a crisis and they take the lead when a crisis erupts. That’s a lesson for the next LIPA chief, and for senior executives everywhere.