Flashback 1990: Criticism hurts Edison employees

Crawford Generating Station

     Part of the shock of Chicago historian Shermann Dilla Thomas being summarily fired by ComEd is this: I generally LIKE Commonwealth Edison, as an organization. They not only keep the lights on, but are also receptive — at least they responded to my inquiry about Thomas, which isn't a given anymore. Plus, when the power went out on the West Side, and TV stations were castigating them because their trucks were seen parked at fast food restaurants — as if their crews shouldn't eat while they coped with the crisis — I contacted ComEd and asked to talk to the guy who got the call when the power failed, and they put me in touch with an engineer. That impressed me, a view that lingered — golly — for over a third of a century. This is the story that resulted, a pleasure for us fans of infrastructure. 

     Carl Segneri, an engineer for Commonwealth Edison, was working in the basement of his Naperville home at about 10:15 p.m. Saturday, July 28, putting up studs to build a wall.
     Segneri's wife, Claudia, was eight months pregnant with their fourth child, so it was high time to convert the unfinished basement into a recreation room for his growing family.
     At the same time, at Edison's Crawford Station, 3501 S. Pulaski Rd., something was going wrong with a section of 2-inch, lead-sheathed copper cable inside the high-voltage power-transfer station.
     The cable cracked, spewing 12,000 volts of electricity. Circuit breakers, which should have shut down that part of the system, failed to open "for reasons not yet clear." The powerful arc of electricity burned everything it touched — copper wire, lead shielding, steel and concrete.
     For Commonwealth Edison, the Crawford Station fire was the beginning of the late summer blues, an eight-week period during which there were four major power failures — three on the West Side and one in Streeterville — and a killer tornado that wiped out power lines, poles, transformers and 345,000-volt transmission towers southwest of the city.
     For employees like Segneri, the problems meant a grueling series of 16-, 18-, and even 24-hour days. Their thank yous came in the form of excoriating criticism, if not ridicule, from the public they were trying to help.
     "I was there until Sunday night at 8 p.m.," said Segneri, whose job was to assess damage. "Someone drove me home. It wasn't just the hours, it was the stress of having to deal with the problem."
     "People don't realize the human side of the company," said Don Petkus, an Edison vice-president in charge of communications. In the storm of accusations to follow, it somehow got overlooked that Edison does not strive to create major power failures and, in fact, exerts a great deal of human effort to fix them once they occur.
     Though the Crawford Station fire burned in a small area, it spewed dense smoke, playing havoc with delicate electrical circuits and relays.
     Inside the Crawford control room, the warning board lit up. Some protective devices automatically removed Crawford transformers from the citywide grid. Others had to be removed, manually, by the Crawford staff, the first of the Edison personnel called in. By day's end, more than 1,000 Edison employees were called in for emergency service.
     "It's amazing how many people get quickly involved," said Tom Maiman, vice-president of engineering. "They spring into action, and from that point on, until service is restored, it's a 24-hour-a-day job."
     As engineers such as Segneri tried to cope with the technical problem of repairing the scorched system, other employees such as John T. Hooker, administrator of government affairs, addressed the logistical problem created by 40,000 people in a 14-square-mile area suddenly being without electricity.
     Hooker was beeped at 8 a.m. and spent the next 16 hours assisting irate aldermen and coordinating community service activities. For Hooker, it was the beginning of a pattern that would become too familiar in the weeks ahead.
     "Every outage caught me at different times," said Hooker. The morning after the Crawford fire found him in a promising game at the Terry Hill Golf Course in Flossmoor, one over par at the fifth hole. "I paid off my bets and left," he said. The second, he was about to meet his mother at the airport. He sent somebody else. When Streeterville went, he was closing a deal on a new car. He lost the deal and had to buy a different car.
      Not even the highest levels were spared. James J. O'Connor, Edison chairman, was in New York to attend his son's wedding the morning after the Crawford fire when he got a call about the power failure. He was on the next plane home.
     "He is the type of person who has to be there," said Petkus. "He's so anxious to have problems corrected he wants to pull the switch himself. It's not only how he responds, but in general how people in the company respond."
     "In our company, the Crawford fire is akin to the assassination of President Kennedy, or other momentous events," said John F. Hogan, director of communications. "People know where they were at the time they heard of it."
     Hogan said Edison employees were stung by the criticism they received.
     "Daley drives by on the Laramie Avenue overpass and doesn't see anybody outside of Crawford, so he says nothing is being done," said Hogan, who guessed that the mayor expected to see people "in the yard, raking the grass."
    "For the poor guy working 12 or 24 hours, that hurts," he said.
     Edison employees point out that emergency response is really the nature of their job since it is inevitable that, at times, the power will go out.
     "Electrical things fail," said Maiman. "Trees fall down and hit transformers. People in cars hit poles. Our people are used to responding all hours of the day and night."
     While the firemen were still inside Crawford, engineers tried to bring the Columbus Park Substation, 1010 S. Laramie, back on line by rerouting power to it. That worked, for a while, but without the high-speed circuit breakers inside Crawford, the arrangement was lacking an important backup system.
     That backup system would have come in handy one week after the Crawford fire — Sunday morning, Aug. 4 — when the Columbus Park station blew up.
     "We were within one hour of installing a high-speed relay at Columbus," said Maiman. "That would have cleared the problem in a tenth of a second. Without it, by the time the back-up acted, the transformer had failed. It ignited the oil, blew the pressure relief, and a huge fireball went through the ceiling, all of which Channel 5 captured on video. We had it back in service in six hours, but it was, `Edison did it again to the people on the West Side."
     At the same moment flames were breaking through the roof of the Columbus Park Substation, Carl Segneri was getting ready to go with his family to St. Joan of Arc Church in Lisle. The phone rang. His family went without him.

          — Originally appeared in the Sun-Times, Oct. 7, 1990

Update: Carl Segneri worked for Exelon, ComEd's parent, for 29 years. He's now vice president/grid solutions at Quanta Technology. The Crawford Generating Station, one of the last coal-powered electrical stations located within a city in the United States, closed in 2012 and was demolished in 2019.