Pepco and BGE reap what they sow

Over the last few weeks Pepco, one of the major power suppliers for Maryland, along with their compatriots at BGE, have found themselves getting beaten up pretty badly in the media and facing scorn and discord from their customers.  Many of their customers lost power during some severe thunder storms that passed through the area a few weeks back and then once the storms passed through the clean-up efforts began and soon after the power restoration efforts, and therein is the problem for these two major utilities.  The power restoration efforts and clean-up efforts took, at least in the opinion of most of their customers, far too long to accomplish and left far too many people without power during some of the hottest times of the year.  Elderly residents that rely on power to keep their fridges running so they can keep medications cold, as well as relying on the power to keep the air conditioning running in their homes so they too can stay cool, and of course younger residents as well, all lost power and waited for long periods of time to have it restored.

Those customers understand the nature of the beast and know that the storms that came through the D.C. metro area and did so much damage were not expected/anticipated and they know the storms did far more damage than a typical summer thunderstorm does, but when they went for days upon days without power and then got nothing but doubletalk or false and misleading information from the power companies they grew angrier and angrier.

Long ago, if my memory is not failing me, I talked about this same issue and how these power companies were responsible for the mess.  They have cut back on personnel to barebones levels, if not even lower, and in reality they don't have the crews readily available to deal with these kinds of problems.  Pepco admits that they had to bring in crews from Ohio and other places and of course it takes a considerable period of time to get those crews from those areas into the areas that need the attention and during all of that staging and movement of resources the customers sit without power and the clean-up work waits as customers and residents know they are not supposed to put themselves in harm's way lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a severe electrical jolt (as one young man found out when trying to help his neighbors out as he was fatally shocked when attempting to remove a tree branch near a power line).

Emergencies aren't easily predicted and managing them after the fact is not an easy task either, but these companies used to do a far better job of dealing with these issues back in the days when they were regulated power companies and weren't looking so hard at their bottom line profit margins.  In older days they carried more than enough personnel to proactively trim trees and branches back away from power lines, and they carried more than enough personnel to man their repair crews so when power lines were damaged they could be repaired as soon as possible and power would be restored to customers as fast as humanly possible.  Now, in modern times, the crews aren't here until after the damage is done and they can't get here quickly enough to respond in a timely fashion.  There is no longer that "as fast as humanly possible" element and customers are not happy and politicians are grand-standing on the issues.

Pepco could hire additional personnel and train them and keep them ready, but of course they won't as it would mean paying personnel that are often not needed, or at least would be, in their minds, looking for things to do (uh, gee, how about going back to proactively trimming trees and such?!? an effort that really does seem to be lacking in most areas) while collecting paychecks.

BGE is in the same boat, and they too don't seem all that interested in changing the situation.

Sadly both companies may be looking down the barrel of a hurricane that may deliver some damage this coming weekend.  Of course for this one they are getting plenty of advance notice and they may very well have crews on alert and may already be paying to move personnel into the area to be at the ready.  If so, good for them.  If not, then shame on them for not learning the lessons of the last storm.  Either way, eventually the customers will be paying for it all as the costs of all of the clean-up and power restoration will of course be passed directly on to the customer at the earliest possible point.