Blame it on Mother Nature.
That's the overriding conclusion of a 300-page report released Tuesday by PacifiCorp chronicling the 2003 holiday power outages in Utah, which followed one of the biggest storms the company has faced in its 15-year existence.
"No doubt this had a severe impact on customers and communities, and we are very sorry for what customers experienced," Judi Johansen, PacifiCorp's chief executive, told state regulators Tuesday. "For us, we frankly have admitted already that we did not live up to the standard that we want to hold ourselves to in terms of customer service and our commitment to customers."
The massive snowstorm, which affected roughly 190,000 PacifiCorp customers along the Wasatch Front, was described by company officials as a "mega-storm," ranking as one of the worst to hit the state in the past 75 years.
Public outcry over the outages led the Utah Public Service Commission to open a formal fact-finding investigation into why PacifiCorp customers were affected more severely than surrounding municipalities, like Bountiful and Murray, which operate their own electric utilities.
PacifiCorp operates as Utah Power in Utah and is internationally owned by ScottishPower.
The main cause for the outages, according to Matthew Wright, PacifiCorp's executive vice president for power delivery, was tree-related.
"If every single tree had been trimmed along the Wasatch Front in accordance with our specification," Wright said, "80 percent of the outages would have happened anyway."
In fact, the report said that 80 percent of the outages were the direct result of "fast-growing, weak-wooded species, and more than 60 percent were caused by a single problematic species, Siberian elm."
Combined with myriad other cascading failures, including the breakdown of the company's automated outage management system, about a third of PacifiCorp's Utah customers lost their electricity, some for up to five days.
A separate report also released Tuesday by Florida-based Williams Consulting Inc., under the direction of the Utah Division of Public Utilities, said the National Weather Service classified the storm as a once-in-10-years event.
"A confluence of factors," the Williams report said, "including drought-weakened trees coupled with heavy, high-water content snow, caused widespread outages."
Mike Rafferty, vice president of Williams, told state regulators that the utility was essentially "flying blind" after the breakdown of its automated outage management system, known as "CADOPS."
Yet Rafferty's analysis appeared to contradict PacifiCorp's conclusion that more tree-trimming would have done little to prevent the outages.
Rafferty said the company's 6.4-year trim cycle contributed to the outages. PacifiCorp has said it should be on a three-year trim cycle and anticipates it will be on the first year of that cycle by 2005.
Rafferty also pointed to Utah Power ranking in the bottom 25 percent of a 2002 national reliability survey.
He added that PacifiCorp's equipment-related outages at 45 percent were much higher the than the nationwide industry average of 25 percent.
"A catch-up maintenance program may be in order," said Rafferty, adding that the company's distribution maintenance spending per customer at $27.78 trailed the national average by more than $17.
Over the past decade, the Williams report said, the number of Utah Power employees declined by nearly half while customer numbers increased 31 percent.
Rafferty questioned whether the company could adequately accomplish its maintenance work load with such reductions.
David Irvine, an attorney who has filed a class-action petition against PacifiCorp over the holiday outages, told regulators that he was concerned that the incident would be declared a "major event" too quickly. A major-event classification exempts the utility from making payments to customers who experience an extended outage. PacifiCorp officials said they would file for major-event status on Wednesday.
"There are a lot of people out there who went through bloody hell over the outage in December," Irvine said. "I think there is far more concern about what happens here than may be evident from what has transpired today."
E-mail: danderton@desnews.com