Does BGE restore power to big shots first?
If I were the boss of Baltimore Gas & Electric I would be tempted to set up a secret plan to treat Very Important Neighborhoods differently than those of the plebes. Did the governor's lights go off? Put him at the top of the list for repair.
No, wait. Put the members of the Public Service Commission first. They're the ones who will approve or reject the application by BGE parent Constellation Energy to merge with Exelon. They're the ones who are developing reliablity standards for BGE and other utilities. Naturally I asked BGE whether it gives special treatment to important public officials. And I asked the governor, the mayor and the PSC commissioners about their electricity experiences last weekend during the hurricane.
BGE denies giving special attention to anybody. "The answer is no," says company spokesman Rob Gould. "We are not putting anyone in any priority order as it relates to special customers." What about PSC Chairman Doug Nazarian? He tells me his power was back on by Sunday afternoon. (As I write this Tuesday evening, about 200,000 BGE homes still lack power, according to the company's storm-center Web site.) "We don't even know his address," Gould said. "We don't mark neighborhoods for special folks."
UPDATE: The remaining PSC commissioners got back to me this morning. Harold Williams says his power went out at 5:30 a.m. Sunday and came back on at 12:30. Kelly Speakes-Backman says:
I have BGE. I lost power at 8:30 sat night, got it backTuesMonday afternoon. Lost it againyesterdayTuesday for a few hours in the afternoon. I was told by the customer service person there was some switch problem affecting 3000 customers that time. Oh, and we borrowed my cousin's generator so no spoiled food, but we're on well so we had no water.
Gov. Martin O'Malley's power flickered on and off but never went totally out, said spokeswoman Raquel Guillory. Two PSC members -- Lawrence Brenner and Kevin Hughes -- live in Pepco territory, which was hit much less heavily by Irene. They said they didn't lose electricity, either. I was unable to get responses from the PSC's Harold Williams and Kelly Speakes-Backman.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake lost power for "over 24 hours," said spokesman Ryan O'Doherty, but she wasn't sure when it came back on because she was in the city's emergency operations center. "She did have to throw out food," O'Doherty said. (For the record, my power in Ellicott City never went out.) Here is the response from PSC Chairman Nazarian, who says he has "no idea" whether his neighborhood gets special treatment from BGE:
My power went out sometime Saturday night and came back on late Sunday afternoon. We plugged our refrigerator into a neighbor's generator for a while, but did throw out some spoiled food, too. A large tree branch fell in my front yard, but missed our house and the neighbors', so fortunately no impact. We haven't had water in our basement for years and didn't this time. I have no idea whether
my neighborhood is tagged. By coincidence, our utility accounts are in my wife's name (they have been since we moved to Catonsville in 1999, and maybe all along), and we did not call in the outage ourselves (we were in Boston on Saturday night and Sunday for a family bat mitzvah, so we were not in town to call it in). And we certainly have never asked for special treatment -- in fact, when our Peak Rewards thermostat didn't come back on right away in July, we got a repair appointment six days out, so we clearly weren't flagged there.
Comments
Not sure if there is a priority list for utility repair. Am sure if 'it' got out, it could get ugly real fast right now.
Posted by: ruth | August 30, 2011 7:09 PM
The short, and complete, answer is "No". I no longer work at BGE, but did during both Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Isabel. I had a prominent role in coordinating and managing restoration efforts during both storms. BGE's restoration priorities are exactly as they communicate. Specifically, after restoring sites with public health and safety impact (hospitals, sewage treatment plants, etc.), BGE prioritizes outages based on getting the most customers back in service the fastest. There is no mechanism within their outage management system to provide special treatment for certain customers. Believe me, the hard working folks dispatching the work (as well as completing the restorations) have more to worry about in this time of emergency than which VIPs may happen to be affected by a particular case of system damage.
Posted by: Greg DiDio | August 30, 2011 8:32 PM
The short, and complete, answer is "No". I no longer work at BGE, but did during both Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Isabel. I had a prominent role in coordinating and managing restoration efforts during both storms. BGE's restoration priorities are exactly as they communicate. Specifically, after restoring sites with public health and safety impact (hospitals, sewage treatment plants, etc.), BGE prioritizes outages based on getting the most customers back in service the fastest. There is no mechanism within their outage management system to provide special treatment for certain customers. Believe me, the hard working folks dispatching the work (as well as completing the restorations) have more to worry about in this time of emergency than which VIPs may happen to be affected by a particular case of system damage.
Posted by: Greg DiDio | August 30, 2011 8:33 PM
I have a relative who works in the emergency call center and I know for a fact they prioritize by the number of people out due to a single problem and/or public safety concerns, traffic lights down/out, hot wires on the ground, etc.. That means if you're in a large development with lots of neighbors all powerless, you would get priority over say 5 homes on one blown transformer on a dead end street with no traffic lights out. I know this from my relative and personal experience as my relative flat out told me during Floyd to clean out my fridge and stay at someone's house because it was going to be almost 2 weeks before BGE got to my street. I even had flooding and a fire at the house too, but that didn't impact the my status with BGE. So I wisely took a trip and got out of town and turned it over to the insurance company when I got back.
But that doesn't tell the entire story and even my relative will admit this. BGE emergency call center employees wouldn't know if a direct phone call has been made to someone higher up at BGE above them or even their supervisors. For instance if an important politician's power were out, no BGE worker would know if the Governor or Mayor or a Delegate or Senator made a direct call to one of the BGE/Constellation execs or even Mayo Shattuck. If such a phone call were made, no one would notice and it's unlikely anyone would ever find out.
So, in general, BGE restores service in the best fairest way possible without regard for rich or poor. Even having a relative in the emergency call center won't bump you up (employees would be immediately fired outright for doing so and they know it.). But ultimately it's impossible to know if just a few connected people got special treatment.
Posted by: Comics Hero | August 30, 2011 9:29 PM
Geez, Jay. This is the sleaziest ploy for hits I've seen you use, yet.
Posted by: mdenergygal | August 30, 2011 11:31 PM
BGE's biggest problem is they don't invest in their infrastructure. This is now the 8th day that I have had to spend away from my apartment this year and that is TOO MUCH! The way the lines to our complex are run borders on Rube Goldberg. You think they would try to fix potential problems but they don't. There's been NO tree cutting in my neighborhood to cut down on problems and we are always the last to get restored. I despise BGE management....
Posted by: LaureInGlenBurnie | August 31, 2011 9:03 AM
I think there are several issues with BGE:
1) Network management is poor. They need to segment things better so they can bring up smaller sections faster. Up here on Masemore Road, there is no breaker before the line moves into the woods, so when a tree falls across a line, it takes the whole road down instead of the section just in the "danger area". There have been a number of anecdotal stories this time about how people had power through the storm, only to lose it when BGE started re-energizing nearby areas.
2) Deployment is crazy. They'll send workers from one service center into another they don't know, and then expect them to work there as if they do. During Isabel, the entire York Road feed from Hereford to MD Line was down because the lines had been ripped off one house... and the workers from NJ wouldn't believe the local residents about where the problem is. A Cockeysville employee came home on a lunch break, threw the one breaker, and restored an entire segment in 10 minutes. He could do this because he knew where everything was in his service area...
This unfortunately, points to a larger management and leadership issue. Its not he fault of the linemen, who have very little control over how resources are allocated. This is the fault of the suits.
If the Public Service Commission wanted to do the Public any good, they would stop setting benchmarks for performance and actually investigate the processes behind the restoration strategies, the planning and network management, and the disaster recovery scheme.
Posted by: Gunpowder Chronicle | August 31, 2011 10:20 AM
Jay: I heard Del. McDonough say that over the past 10 years or so, BGE has gutted the size and effectiveness of its repair crews -- ostensibly as a way of boosting short-term profits. What can you find out about what BGE has done in terms of staffing over the past several years? Has BGE sought short-term gains and high officer salaries over the safety and reliability of its power distribution network? For a State regulate monopoly, that seems pretty appalling.
Posted by: David Gilliss | September 1, 2011 9:20 AM
if Mayor SRB was smart and not the idiot that Baltimoreians elected she would know that if she looked at a clock in her house she could count the hours back based on the current time to figure out when the power came back on. But instead she is putting on makeup and looking pretty for the cameras to make us believe she is doing something other than being a failure for the city of Baltimore.
Posted by: phillip | September 2, 2011 2:06 PM
As a spouse of a BGE exec, enough already and rest assured that power to our home was not a priority. Our family spent almost 92 hours in the dark. Nor would I expect it to be so. My husband spend all day planning restorations and came home very late to a dark home to be with his family.
We were adequately prepared with a generator to keep frig and freeze operational...No lights no TV...we have family and friends and made plans during the day.
There were some tough moments, but we weathered the storm..
How about a word of thanks to all those who did restorations than look for a little dirt....
Thanks Greg for your kind comments...
Posted by: Kit Burton | September 5, 2011 8:51 AM