Generators at Ground Zero: Power generation suppliers mobilize to respond to WTC attacks; 102 MW of mobile power; Y2K efforts pay off in disaster response

Diesel Progress North American Edition, Nov, 2001 by Brent Haight

When the unthinkable happened on September 11, 2001, the entire country was stunned. But within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, power generation equipment manufacturers and their dealers and distributors were taking inventory of all available equipment to see what could be immediately mobilized to aid the rescue and recovery efforts in New York and Washington D.C. By that afternoon, staging areas had been voluntarily established by many of the power generation companies throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Baltimore.

Cummins Power Generation utilized Cummins Metropower locations in the Bronx and Newark, N.J., to stage more than 150 MW of mobile power. Caterpillar Power Systems delivered more than 100 MW of power to staging areas at Foley Rents, Hightstown, NJ. and H.O. Penn facilities in Poughkeepsie and Holtsville, N.Y. Caterpillar Power Systems also established a staging area at Albans Yards in Baltimore to assist the recovery and cleanup efforts at the Pentagon.

MultiQuip used its Newark, N.J., warehouse to stage hundreds of generators representing the company's complete product range.

In New York, two substations, along with transmission lines that tied them into the grid, were destroyed by the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, leaving thousands of customers in lower Manhattan without electricity. Consolidated Edison, the local utility, mobilized more than 1900 workers to begin restoring power. Not an easy task, considering that more than 1.6 million sq.ft. of office space -- about the same amount of office space in all of Dayton, Ohio -- had come crumbling down.

ConEd took the lead in delegating generators to building sites to restore power to lower Manhattan. The mayor's office provided a priority list, dictating which buildings could safely be brought back on line. From there, ConEdison evaluated the building to determine what equipment needed to be used to handle the building load. Teams of technicians from the power generation companies coordinated their efforts through a command center established by ConEd.

"The logistics involved in coordinating the restoration of power were pretty significant," said Stephen Wood, vice president of engineering services at ConEd. "The whole area was a crime scene, especially close to the World Trade Center. We had to be sensitive and work closely with the police and fire departments, especially when we moved fuel trucks through the area to refuel the generators.

"We use a two-teamed approach to restore power. One team only worked on getting generators to the buildings and getting the buildings running on temporary mobile power, while the other team focused on rebuilding, repairing and replacing the damaged grid.

"Our intent, right after the incident, was to get power back to the area from he cable in or under the street. But we knew that couldn't be done overnight because of the damaged transmission circuits and everything we had to bypass round the World Trade Center site.

"We designed and started to build the temporary cables that were going on and below the street level. At the same time, in order to get customers back in their buildings, we brought in generators and put them in place."

Upon assignment from ConEd, technicians from the power equipment companies met ConEd crews at the building site. ConEd crews surveyed to locate the main transformer that serviced the building and at that point, the building was handed over to the generator technicians. The technicians wired off the transformer and generator and set the cable on the street. ConEd then hooked the building to the generator wiring. When generator technicians finished one building, they would return to the ConEd command center for another building to bring on line.

"At the peak, we had approximately 86 generators on line ranging from 1.3 to 1.9 MW," said Wood. "We ended up with the equivalent of a 102 MW power plant in mobile power."

The grid restoration team used trenching equipment, jackhammers and backhoes to rebuild the grid above and below ground. By the time they finished, ConEd had laid more than 33 miles of high voltage cable around the damage zone.

"What we have now is a temporary repair that will last until the beginning of summer if necessary," said Wood. "We'd like to get it out of there before then, but right now our plan is to keep most of that in place until summer, and then we'll be doing transfers over small sections at a time.

"We have the network grids down in lower Manhattan. We did that by tying them in to other networks that were already energized in the area, similar to bringing in long extension cords and running them through the area. We have all of those tied together, and that will get us through the winter. Once we hit summer and the peak loads, then there won't be enough capacity in the network, so we have to have the replacements on line.

"We've rethought the concept of powering lower Manhattan. We have another station under construction right now that will be finished by summer. But we are also looking for alternative sites to add an additional substation or two in the area. We'd like to have as much diversity as we can in the area of lower Manhattan because loads are very heavy. For example, there was 90 MW of load in the WTC buildings.