It may take more than a week to restore power across the region in the wake of Friday's violent storms, Pepco Region President Tom Graham told WTOP Sunday morning.
"We're working as quickly and safely as we can for our customers, but it's hard work. … It's very labor intensive," Graham said in an on-air interview.
According to Graham, Pepco's early efforts have been focused on assessment and repairing the supply lines that feed the utility's substations.
"Now that those have been solidified—and those resources have really been behind the scenes, working on the property, restoring that service—now you'll see a greater presence in the community from those resources," Graham said.
Graham also said that the utility was bringing in mutual assistance crews from as far away as Oklahoma and that tree trimmers were due to arrive from the Carolinas.
The sudden nature of the storm made it difficult to prepare ahead of time, Graham said, "but we already have a lot of resources on the property because of the reliability plan we've been executing the last few years."
Have you lost power? How are you coping with the outage? Let us know in the comments section.
As for fault and blame, I think there can be no doubt that it mostly lies with PEPCO. I think it's more than a little foolish to blame the people who plant and/or do not remove trees. You can't just chop down all the trees in scores of residential neighborhoods populated by hundreds of thousands of residents. For many reasons I'll decline to delineate here, trees are rather important . . . Go listen to that Joni Mitchell song. She'll tell you. :-) In summation: Hold PEPCO accountable. Don't blame Nature and her verdant earthly representatives. And protect the elderly, for the love of God.
What puzzles me even more though is why it takes so long to restore power in the DC metro area. I have lived in third-world countries where the power goes out constantly but it was alway restored quickly. For example, when I lived in Egypt for ten years, I experienced power outages weekly, but only for minutes or, at most, hours at a time. The same thing was true in other countries that I lived in. It was always annoying and sometimes disruptive, but NEVER the magnitude of our outages here and the time required to restore service. But, then, PEPCO is a private company, something which I cannot fathom, given the extreme importance of this utility, especially in cases of dire emergency.
See this article here http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/omalley-and-the-outages-why-cant-liberals-make-the-trains-run-on-time/259314/#