Pepco, BG&E Graded on Hurricane Irene Performance
Prince George’s Council blasts BG&E officials, gives high marks to Pepco.
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Members of the Prince George's County Council complained to Pepco and Baltimore Gas and Electric Tuesday about the utilities' performance during Hurricane Irene, but the worst criticism went to BG&E.
While council members said Pepco made noticible improvements in customer service and numbers of outages from storms earlier this year, BG&E was blasted for lack of communication to customers and poor planning.
Tuesday's meeting was the first time since the hurricane that companies addressed the council on their performance.
Councilwoman Andrea Harrison (D-Dist. 5) complained that one school in her district was closed for five days due to power outages.
Harrison said she’s been a BG&E customer all of her life and can never recall such bad service during a storm.
“I’m very dissatisfied in the level of service from BG&E that we saw,” she said. “I don’t think it’s our responsibility to do the coordinating…I’m just really disappointed. I don’t even remember anything having as bad as it was [during the aftermath of the storm].”
Councilwoman Mary A. Lehman (D-Dist. 1) of Laurel told officials that her community was plagued by downed trees that cut power in the Laurel area.
Along Brooklyn Bridge Road in West Laurel, she said, a downed tree blocked the roadway for days. Lehman said that because BG&E did not adequately communicate with Verizon, which has lines running through the area, and the county’s Department of Transportation and Public Works, which has right-of-way, power stayed off for days.
“It seems there was a real lack of coordination with BG&E, Department of Public Works and Transportation, and Verizon,” she said.
Darryl Stokes, vice president of engineering and standards for BG&E, said that the situation in West Laurel was not normal.
“That was an unusual event in terms of coordination,” he said, adding that the tree disrupted a trunk line that could have taken out telephone service for most of the county.
During the peak of outages, more than 750,000 BG&E customers lost power during Irene—35 percent, or 80,435, were in Prince George’s County, according to the company. BG&E officials said that the county had the lowest outage rate per customer served in the company's nine-county territory.
By comparison, more than 137,000 Pepco customers in Prince George’s County were without power. Pepco restored power to 98 percent of its customers within 50 hours, according to the company.
Chris Burton, senior vice president of operations and planning for BG&E, conceded that the severity of the hurricane tested several processes and procedures that held during smaller storms.
“The scope of the storm certainly challenged us," he said.
Burton told the council that the company was in the process of developing better procedures to handle service outages and customer service during future storms. He said that a plan would be in place before winter.
Kirk Marchand
6:58 am on Wednesday, September 28, 2011
For what we pay, there should be no outage for any reason at any time. Just my neighborhood generates miliions a month for PEPCO andf BG&E, for the massive mounts of cash they are getting from us the lines should be buried and there should be bypass systems in place when transformers blow out. At the very least we should be able to see repair people on the job immediately after the storm passes, in the erxample cited in the story, someone should have immediately been in the neighborhood to assess the outage. We're getting handyman service for contractor prices, and the state needs to either mandate 100% service at the current rates or a 50% to 75% rollback to align prices with the quality of service.
Sharp Shooter
9:49 am on Wednesday, September 28, 2011
@kirk - Nice dreamy proposition but certainly easier said than done.
Burying lines in an existing development is too expensive, unless the homeowners are willing to swallow the $2k +/- per house costs. Were the lines above ground when you bought your house? Either way, it might not have even mattered if a local transformer was lost.
Look at the electricity supply as snow. In our area 99% of the time a snow shovel will suffice and a snowblower is overkill. During a rain/wind storm 99% of the time the electricity stays on and a generator isn't needed.
When a big storm hits you can't blame mother nature for not being prepared. While not perfect, BGE has made a significant effort in trying to improve things with their '40 year tree trimming' program.
Kirk Marchand
11:57 am on Wednesday, September 28, 2011
OK, assuming it would cost $2000 per house to bury the lines, that's fine. That's 4 or 5 months of 1 years bills for my house. And when you figure in the cost of repeatedly bringing in repair labor and repair costs every time there' s a major weather event, burying the lines is pretty competetive. Also, in a lot of areas it's more than 1% downtime, people I know in Silver Spring were out 15 to 21 days last year and 9 days this year so far. Why are they charged the same rates I am? Their service is clearly inferior to mine, they should be charged less.
I could go on but my main point is that you are absolutely correct in your points about the existing system, my point is that if that is the current state of the system my rates should be significantly reduced. The existing service is severly inferior to the money being charged.