City departments sited improvements to their responses of the recent December snowstorm but also said they could have done better.

At a joint meeting of the environment, emergency management and transportation committees, representatives from Seattle City Light, department of transportation and Seattle Public Utilities told council members what they did right and fielded questions about how they could have improved their services and communicated more effectively with other city and county departments.

Seattle City Light Superintendent Jorge Carrasco said the department has improved its readiness compared to the windstorm two years ago, which caused widespread damage to the region.

During the 2006 storm, City Light had 160 line workers responding to effected areas. Nearly 200 were working the 2008 storm, but the department would like to have closer to 225, said Carrasco.

"While I think the response was better (than 2006) .... I think we are still learning from our past experiences," Carrasco said.

To prepare for upcoming adverse weather, City Light held several storm preparation meetings in Seattle neighborhoods and have entered into a purchase agreement for an "outage management system," which estimates how long it will take to restore power in different areas of the city.

"My impression is that Seattle City Light was far more prepared for this storm than two years ago," said council member Tom Rasmussen. "You learned a lot."

The storm, which lasted approximately eight days (Dec. 17-25) left about 12,700 people without power, which is consistent with a "very small storm," said Carrasco. In comparison, the short snowstorm on Jan. 4 and 5 left roughly 20,000 customers without power. Several of those outages were outside of the city and unrelated to weather.

It helped that the snow in December was "light and dry," which helped reduce the number of power outages because fewer branches fell on power lines from the weight of the snow.

Kevin Desmond, general manager of King County Metro Transit, said the public could expect a full report in its response to the snowstorm by the end of the month.

Despite having to reduce service to nearly half its operations, Desmond said thousands of customers were moved around the city safely with out any major accidents or injuries.

The storm "severely impacted our resources across the board," said Desmond. "We deeply appreciate the patience of our customers."

Buses were chained and several routes were cancelled. At one point on Dec. 18, approximately 200 buses were stuck on the snowy, icy streets.

One major challenge was relaying a "tremendous" amount of information from the field to Metro's customer service department and making real-time information available on its Web site. It was a major issue with just four radio channels, said Desmond.

"What we need is more radio channels, which we are working on getting right now," said Desmond.

He noted that in about a year-and-a-half, the department should have the technology available to provide better up-to-date information to the public.

But the No.1 lesson learned, Desmond told council members, was the need to create a 50 percent operational plan. Metro currently has a pre-established plan in place for operating on 80 percent its regular routing system.

"The trade-off is that people will have to walk," he said, but added that the quality of service would be better and it would likely be easier to communicate with the public if a plan is in place for reduced service.

Rebekah Schilperoort can be reached at 783-1244 or rebekahs@robinsonnews.com.