At 2:40 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2025, the seawall at Breaker Point gave way and Storm Odessa drove a nine-foot surge into Substation 4, the low brick building that fed most of Port Calloway’s east side. Within an hour, 212,000 of the city’s 240,000 households had lost power.
Some of them would wait 19 days. The median household went 156 hours — six and a half days — without electricity, according to an after-action review by Calloway Public Power, the city-owned utility. To keep the city’s two hospitals supplied, the utility ran rolling load shedding on the west side for four days. Restoration cost $1.4 billion.
“We didn’t have a storm problem. We had a single-point-of-failure problem,” said Tomasz Wren, the utility’s chief engineer, standing in the gutted shell of Substation 4 last month. “Every line on the east side ran back to this room, and this room was eight feet above sea level.”
What the city did next has made Port Calloway an unlikely case study. Instead of rebuilding the grid as it was, the City Council voted 7–2 on Nov. 18, 2025, to approve the Tide Line plan: a $2.1 billion, five-year program to bury exposed lines, move critical equipment to higher ground and, most ambitiously, break the grid into dozens of smaller pieces that can keep running on their own.
Those pieces are microgrids — clusters of homes, clinics and shops with their own solar panels and batteries, able to disconnect from the wider network and “island” when the main grid fails. The plan calls for 38 of them. Fourteen are running today.
The largest single investment sits on the old container terminal at the Old Port: a 120-megawatt battery installation, energized on May 30, 2026, that can carry roughly a quarter of the city’s evening demand for up to four hours. In February the city won a $640 million federal resilience grant, which covers about 30 percent of the plan’s cost.
Crews have so far buried 61 kilometers of overhead line in the neighborhoods where Odessa’s winds did the most damage. Burying cable costs about five times as much per kilometer as stringing it on poles, Wren said, “but you only pay for it once.”
The first real test came sooner than anyone wanted. On Aug. 22, 2026, Tropical Storm Basil crossed the bay with gusts of 70 miles per hour. Outages peaked at 48,000 households. The median outage lasted nine hours.
“My phone said the grid was down and I didn’t notice,” said Aiyana Brooks, a nurse who runs the cooling center at the Linden Street community hall, one of the first microgrids to come online. “The fridges with the insulin stayed cold. Last year we were driving it across the bridge in coolers.”
Basil was a far weaker storm than Odessa, and engineers caution against reading too much into a single event. “Nine hours against a tropical storm is not the same as nine hours against a hurricane,” said Priya Raman, who studies grid resilience at the Gulf Coast Resilience Institute. “What we can say is that the parts that were rebuilt behaved the way the models said they would.”
Not everyone is persuaded the money is being spent fairly. In the plan’s first phase, microgrids went first to sites with hospitals and emergency shelters, which critics say favored better-connected neighborhoods. Councilmember Luis Ferrante, one of the two votes against the plan, has asked for an independent review of how sites were ranked. Whether the remaining 24 microgrids will be assigned by need remains unclear.
Then there is the bill. Customers have absorbed a 7.8 percent rate increase — about $11.40 a month for the average household — to cover the city’s share. Mayor Delia Marchetti has said she does not expect a second increase, but the utility’s own five-year forecast leaves room for another adjustment if construction costs keep rising.
“People are paying for this, and they deserve to see it working,” Marchetti said. “That’s why every microgrid has a public dashboard. If one isn’t doing its job, you’ll know before I do.”
Larger questions hang over the design itself. The Old Port battery can bridge hours, not days, and nobody yet knows how islanded microgrids would hold up through a week-long outage after a direct hurricane strike. Saltwater is another unknown: buried cable shrugs off wind, but engineers are still studying how it fares when a surge floods the trenches.
State regulators are watching. Harold Benford, a commissioner on the state utilities commission, said three other coastal utilities have requested Port Calloway’s planning documents. “If this works,” he said, “it’s a template. If it doesn’t, it’s a very expensive lesson.”
Back at Substation 4, Wren pointed to a faded line of dried mud on the wall, about chest height. The replacement equipment now stands on a concrete platform up the hill, 22 feet above sea level. “That’s the tide line,” he said. “Everything we build from now on goes above it.”