Residents should expect to spend several days without power as a result of Hurricane Irene, officials say. “I urge customers to prepare for possible extended outages,” said Thomas Graham, Pepco’s regional president.
With more than 788,000 customers in the District of Columbia and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, Pepco has asked other electric company to send 600 utility workers to help, as well as 330 tree crews from the Asplundh Tree Expert Co. in Pennsylvania. As of Thursday, 150 employees of First Energy in Ohio had already arrived.
But after thousands of Pepco customers experienced days-long power outages the last several years — including some caused by minor thunderstorms last summer — some local experts and leaders are wondering if Pepco’s efforts will be enough.
“I’m very skeptical of them because we see the same pattern of activity over and over again,” said D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3. “Anyone who isn’t skeptical hasn’t been paying attention.”
In Maryland, Pepco has neglected grid maintenance and tree trimming, staff at the Maryland Public Service Commission said this month as part of the state’s investigation into Pepco’s reliability.
“Pepco kind of bluntly warned us that if anything happened, if there were storms and things, there will likely be problems,” said Montgomery County Councilman Marc Elrich, D-at large. “We’re going to be more vulnerable than we otherwise would be.”
Hurricane Irene could be unlike anything the region has seen in years, warned Barry Scanlon, president of public safety and crisis management consulting firm Witt Associates, which assessed Pepco’s response to Hurricane Isabel in 2003.
The last major hurricane to hit the area, Isabel left 570,000 Pepco customers without power, many for more than 10 days. The power outages were more widespread than those caused by Hurricanes Hugo and Floyd in 1989 and 1999, respectively, even though the storm was downgraded to a tropical storm after it hit land, according to Witt Associates’ assessment.
Because of budget cuts, utilities around the country have reduced restoration staff and rely more heavily on help from neighboring utilities, Scanlon explained. But because Irene is expected to affect states up and down the East Coast, that help may be hard to come by.
The Washington area has not seen much high wind in the last few years. That, and the ground’s saturation from recent rainstorms, will make trees more likely to fall.
Irene “could very well overwhelm them,” Scanlon said. “If a [category] two or worse hits D.C., power’s going to be out for a couple of weeks.”
Pepco should avoid misrepresenting the expected length of an outage, Scanlon said.
“Don’t tell me it’s going to be three days if it’s going to be 13,” he said.
Like Pepco, BGE has requested 800 workers from inland states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, said spokeswoman Linda Foy.
In Northern Virginia, Dominion Power is not expecting as big of an impact as in areas further east, said spokeswoman Le-Ha Anderson. Still, the company has been talking with other utilities as far south as Florida in case they need extra help.
“There’s going to be a lot of people without power,” Scanlon said. “People should prepare for the worst.”
