Overview
The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) is one of the largest public electric utilities in the United States, serving approximately 1.2 million customers throughout Nassau County, Suffolk County, and the Rockaway Peninsula. LIPA owns the electric transmission and distribution system while operations are performed under a long-term operating services agreement by PSEG Long Island.
In August 2020, Tropical Storm Isaias struck Long Island and the Rockaways, knocking out power to roughly 646,000 customers. What made the event notable wasn't the storm itself — a moderate tropical system, not a worst-case hurricane — but the near-total collapse of the utility's ability to communicate with its customers. Phone lines, text-based outage reporting, the website, and the mobile app failed within hours of one another, and the estimated restoration times the utility did manage to publish proved wildly unreliable.
LIPA needed an independent, credible, and fast accounting of what had gone wrong — one that could withstand scrutiny from the New York State Department of Public Service, state legislators, and a frustrated public, and that would hold up as the basis for renegotiating a major operating contract. LIPA engaged tieBridge to lead that investigation.
The challenge
LIPA's leadership faced a problem that was simultaneously technical, contractual, and political. The failures spanned outage-management software, telephony architecture, vendor relationships, staffing and training, and a multi-state management structure that split accountability between Long Island and the contractor's New Jersey headquarters, all while a second storm could arrive before root causes were even understood.
- Every customer-facing communications channel failed at once, with no tested fallback plan in place.
- The core outage-management system had documented performance problems for weeks before the storm — problems the contractor had not disclosed to its own board-level asset owner.
- Responsibility for Long Island's technology was diffused across a matrixed organization reporting into New Jersey, undermining local accountability.
- Findings needed to be defensible enough to support a possible contract termination or renegotiation, and public enough to restore stakeholder confidence.
Scope of the engagement
Working as part of the LIPA Isaias Task Force, tieBridge led a comprehensive review of PSEG Long Island's customer-facing operations, emergency management capabilities, and mission-critical information systems — from executive management practices and organizational accountability, to the architecture and resilience of every customer contact channel, to an end-to-end review of the outage management and service restoration lifecycle: detection, damage assessment, work prioritization, dispatching, crew allocation, field restoration, and customer communications.
The engagement also covered emergency preparedness (disaster recovery, business continuity, crisis exercises), technology assessment (the Outage Management System, systems integration architecture, release and configuration management, vendor governance), and overall operational resilience — stress testing, scalability, and contingency planning.
Our approach
tieBridge stood up and led a dedicated task force working side by side with LIPA staff and investigators from the New York State Department of Public Service, delivering findings on an aggressive 30-day, 90-day, and 180-day reporting cadence. The team's method combined document forensics, direct interviews, and independent technical testing rather than relying on the contractor's self-reporting — issuing more than 200 formal information requests, reviewing terabytes of operational data and internal correspondence, and building an objective, points-based Storm Performance Scorecard modeled on the state regulator's own methodology, so findings could be benchmarked rather than argued.
The email trail that changed the narrative
Rather than accept the contractor's initial account that the storm itself had overwhelmed otherwise sound systems, the team requested the underlying internal correspondence. Weeks of internal messages surfaced showing operations staff already knew, in mid-July, that the outage-management system could not reliably handle day-to-day activity — let alone a storm — and that management had been alerted in writing that the organization was "not prepared for a weather event." None of this was disclosed to the asset owner before the storm hit three weeks later. That paper trail reframed the entire engagement: what had been described publicly as an unforeseeable technology failure was, in fact, a known and unaddressed risk.
A capacity assumption no one had tested
The contractor's high-volume call-answering system was believed, based on staff recollection rather than any documented, tested figure, to support roughly 78,000 calls per hour. Independent verification found no contractual guarantee and no record the assumed capacity had ever been confirmed through testing. The team's analysis estimated that on the order of one million customer calls and texts went unanswered or were lost during the critical opening days of the response.
An objective scorecard where the numbers spoke for themselves
Scored against verified evidence rather than self-reported claims, the contractor's response earned 260 of 1,000 possible points on tieBridge's Storm Performance Scorecard, against a contractually required minimum of 410 — a transparent, criterion-by-criterion basis for the LIPA Board of Trustees' subsequent contract negotiations.
Recommendations and structural reforms
The engagement culminated in more than 80 specific, prioritized recommendations spanning technology, emergency management, and governance, including decoupling the outage-management system from downstream communications so a single point of failure could no longer cascade across every channel at once, establishing a dedicated, empowered Long Island technology leadership structure with direct local accountability, standing up a joint Crisis Management Team, and requiring documented, independently validated business continuity and disaster-recovery plans backed by realistic stress testing.
Sustained oversight
The engagement did not end with the final report. LIPA retained tieBridge to project-manage implementation of the recommendations across subsequent storm seasons, independently verifying that fixes were real, tested, and durable rather than declared complete on paper, and briefing the LIPA Board of Trustees on a recurring quarterly basis.
Impact
- Gave the LIPA Board of Trustees an independently verified, quantifiable basis — rather than a contested narrative — for its contract-renegotiation decisions.
- Restored a measure of public and regulatory confidence through a transparent reporting cadence covered by New York State legislators and statewide media.
- Converted informal assumptions about system capacity, staffing, and readiness into tested, documented facts.
- Established a durable, multi-year advisory relationship spanning investigation, remediation oversight, and recurring Board reporting.