Hundreds of Marylanders packed into a large conference room in Rockville Monday night for a chance to scold Pepco about its poor service.
“This is not just a failure to communicate. This is a failure to plan, a failure to invest, a failure to perform. It’s incompetence of management and there is no other word for it,” said Harvey Klein, who has lived in Montgomery County since 1973.
“It’s not an outage, its an outrage, sir.”
Helma Goldmark of the Promenade, a community of thousands of senior citizens in Bethesda, said residents have endured 18 outages since Jan. 3.
“Residents of the Promenade have a dream … that [Pepco’s] six-point plan will be implemented,” she said.
“We have dealt with stifling hot apartments for one, two or three days with temperatures reaching the 90s.”
Before citizens got a chance to blast Pepco for its reliability problems, about two dozen elected officials claimed the podium for the first two hours.
“[My relatives] have fewer outages in Mumbai than I do in Gaithersburg,” Del. Kumar Barve, D-Gaithersburg, told the Maryland Public Service Commission, sending the crowd into a fit of laughter.
The hearing was the second of three the state utility watchdog is holding to address Pepco’s record number of outages.
At the first hearing on Aug. 17, commissioners fired questions at a panel of Pepco officials. This time, Pepco executives listened quietly as lawmakers and residents unloaded their grievances on the outage-plagued utility.
Barve and a number of other lawmakers accused Pepco of dramatizing the “dense tree canopy” the utility blames for a majority of its outages.
“There are untrimmed trees planted in [plain view] that completely envelop power lines,” Barve said. “These trees had not been trimmed in over a decade.”
Sen. Brian Frosh, D-Bethesda, said he has spoken to many residents with underground power lines who experience regular outages.
“Trees aren’t the problem,” he said.
Pepco blamed fallen trees and limbs for 90 percent of its outages following a July 25 storm that knocked out power to 240,000 of Pepco’s 302,000 Montgomery residents.
“Hell, what business are we in?” Frosh asked the Pepco officials seated to his left. “Do we not know that we have thunderstorms in the summer?”
County Executive Ike Leggett highlighted the effect of the outages on Montgomery’s businesses.
“[Businesses] lost thousands of dollars in sales,” he said. “This county sometimes may be accused of overreacting … but the testimony you will hear tonight is not from residents who are overreacting.”
