There is “considerable room for improvement” in the way Pepco Holdings Inc. responded to massive power outages caused by Hurricane Isabel in September, particularly in the way it collaborated with communities before the storm hit, an independent analyst said yesterday.
James Lee Witt Associates, a crisis-management firm hired by Pepco to assess the company’s preparation and response to Isabel, said in a draft report that Pepco and sibling company Conectiv performed “according to generally accepted utility practices,” but that they should hold themselves to a higher standard.
The Witt report said the companies should have responded to power outages not simply as disruptions in electricity service, but as a more broad community emergency.
The report also criticized Pepco for failing to have an effective program to deal with tree maintenance and for using resources to distribute dry ice when local governments and nonprofit groups were capable of doing it.
About 74 percent of Pepco customers comprising 550,000 households and businesses in the District and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties lost power after Isabel slammed into the Mid-Atlantic region Sept. 18 as a tropical storm. About 119,000 Conectiv customers in Maryland and 9,000 Conectiv customers in Northern Virginia also lost electricity.
The majority of customers who lost power had service restored within 48 hours, but some were still without electricity as many as 10 days after the storm, causing some to question how well the companies responded and how well they had prepared for the storm.
“The restoration effort could have been more successful had there been well-practiced response coordination between Pepco and Conectiv and the serviced communities,” said the report, which was written by a team supervised by James Lee Witt, a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Clinton.
The Witt report said Pepco should become more involved in communities’ emergency drills and tests, educate the public on how to respond during a power outage, and collaborate with D.C. and Maryland officials on how to prevent downed trees from disrupting electrical service.
The report also said Pepco should consider revising the order in which power is restored to communities. Currently, Pepco follows guidelines that make sense from an engineering point of view, but that may not necessarily be in the best interests of the community’s health and safety.
The company now generally addresses outages near hospitals and other emergency areas first, then restores power to substations and feeder lines that affect the most people.
Pepco said it would use the 177-page document as a blueprint and said many of the report’s conclusions were similar to that of Pepco’s own internal review. The company said it already is implementing several recommendations, including upgrading computer systems to handle higher volumes of data, revising its procedures for handling downed wires and implementing a community-outreach program to seek customer input on issues relating to the restoration of lost power.
“While it is encouraging that independent experts confirmed our belief that we met industry standards for responding to such a situation, we recognize our customers expect more,” said Dennis Wraase, Pepco Holdings’ chief executive officer. “This report challenges us to go beyond normal utility practice.”
Officials in Maryland and the District criticized Pepco and Conectiv frequently in September, and they were apparently even more outspoken when discussing the companies’ problems with the independent analyst.
“The utilities believe that although there were problems, overall they did well; many of the responsible officials we contacted disagree,” the Witt report said.
“We are not surprised there is a major difference in perception because those we interviewed were usually interested in maintaining good relations with their energy provider, and many were more frank with us than they were with company officials.”
Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, who was perhaps the most critical of Pepco’s response and preparation, said yesterday he was pleased that an independent group had taken a critical look at Pepco’s performance, but that the big test will come when another large storm hits the area.
“If during the next storm it still takes days to restore power and deal with downed, live power lines, then the effort … will have been meaningless,” Mr. Duncan said. “Let’s hope that this is not the case.”
The Witt report will be available for public comment online until Feb. 16. A final report will be presented in the spring.
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