Grant PUD needs funds to meet security standards

Deadline to complete work is July 1, 2009

EPHRATA - Grant County PUD staff braced commissioners for an expensive request to pay a Houston-based contractor $920,875 for security work.

Although the utility has 591 employees, staff claimed this week they couldn't hire qualified people fast enough to complete the extra work.

Four key staff members that were involved with the project left the PUD in a period eight months to either accept jobs outside the PUD or retire.

The work on 13 critical infrastructure protection standards must be completed by July 1, 2009, to avoid $1 million a day in fines, said Greg Lange, the PUD's reliability policy and compliance manager. The PUD is compliant with six of the 13 standards, he added.

"We're not the only ones," Lange told commissioners this week. "Every single utility is scrambling."

Lange said the utility may have a violation because staff weren't trained to recognize the difference between sabotage and vandalization. But the PUD has a system set up to notify the FBI of problems, he added.

PUD Commissioner Greg Hansen asked staff how long they had to comply.

Lange said staff knew about the bulk of the requirements since February 2005, but learned about the critical infrastructure protections requirements in April and mentioned that 14 or 15 standards were being revised.

Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) Communications Director Rachel Sherrard said an order adding more criteria was issued on Jan. 18 and the order stated they would become effective 60 days after being published in the federal register.

The order appeared in the federal register on Feb. 7, making the order effective on April 7, she said.

The work the PUD and other utilities must complete includes protecting the nation's power grid, bulk power systems and control centers as required by the WECC and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

WECC and NERC got involved with reliability compliance for the nation's utilities because of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and the 2003 Northeast blackout, Lange said.

If commissioners approve the nine-month contract with Intellibind on Monday, the company will help train staff and implement new procedures, said PUD telecommunications engineer Kyle Hussey.

Commissioner Tom Flint said the contract request wasn't quite a surprise, but a "little more than (he) bargained for."

PUD General Manager Tim Culbertson said himself and managers with area utilities had dinner with a WECC representative last fall to see how it would implement the policies and procedures.

"There was an attitude at that point in time that there was going to be a fairly significant grace period to implement all these changes," Culbertson said. "In fact what happened, there isn't a significant grace period and they got much tougher."