Northwood News ♦ June 2006

Power Issues:  Talking With Pepco About Outages

By Carole Barth

Mr. David Gould, Supervisor of Customer Reliability for Pepco, spoke at the April membership meeting.  Mr. Gould described how power is routed through the neighborhood and described various types of outages.  One important fact we learned from his talk is that Pepco cannot tell exactly where the power is out, only that there is a fault in the system.  Therefore, it is important to report every outage.  Moreover, if power has not been restored in a couple of hours, it is important to call again so they know that further action is needed.

The rest of our discussion was rather frustrating as Mr. Gould attributed all of our non-storm-related reliability problems to trees and squirrels rather than equipment in need of updating/replacement.  He said Pepco will not replace equipment simply because it is old.  We asked how close we are to meeting Pepco’s criteria for equipment replacement, and he said he had not performed that analysis.  He further suggested we all invest in generators and prepare emergency kits to be ready for extended outages.

As residents, we are aware of several “hotspots” where outages are common and equipment is known to be old.  Many of us at home during the day experience frequent outages on clear, still days with no fallen limbs or injured critters in evidence.  Mr. Gould indicated that a tree limb or squirrel might be at fault elsewhere in the system where it cannot be observed.  However, this cannot account for those outages that take place only in the few homes served by a single transformer where it is a simple matter to look for the presence or absence of fallen tree limbs or critters.

We also asked about long-term trends.  Again, many residents have noticed a marked increase in outages in the last several years.  Mr. Gould had not done a long-term trend analysis but offered the opinion that trees in the neighborhood had grown taller over time, thus causing more outages.  While that might make sense in a new development where all the trees were only six feet tall to begin with, Northwood-Four Corners had many more mature trees 15 years ago than exist now, so if trees are to blame one would expect the power to have improved rather than worsened.

Finally, we discussed whether Pepco’s system accurately tracks outages, since Mr. Gould’s figures appeared quite low.  Therefore, we want to begin collecting some independent data (see article).  We will also be following up with Pepco as well as our state legislators to (1) ask them to do further analyses and (2) to see if we can get the equipment improved.   ■