PECO tells supervisors it ‘could have done a better job’ in Sandy’s aftermath

LOWER MAhEFIELD TOWNSHIP – Ted Dorand, PECO’s external affairs manager for Bucks County, discussed the storm and the associated Bucks County power outages at the Lower Makefield Township meeting on Dec. 5.

Addressing concerns of local residents who were promised times for power restoration only to see those times come and go with no electric, Dorand said PECO paid attention to customers’ complaints and admitted there were things the company could have done better.

“I appreciate the fact that customers were frustrated,” Dorand said. “We were expecting to restore customers only to find there was damage. {We need to work on] localized communication. We have to get to a better place. It’s not like we were ignoring Lower Makefield.” Dorand said overall, he would grade PECO’s local performance during and after the storm a “B.”

Despite the relatively high grade, the PECO representative admitted PECO could have done better.

“We could have done a better job,” Drand said. “There is some room for improvement.”

Dorand emphasized that the company learned from the experience and that PECO is doing a “top and bottom inspection” that will continue for several months.

Dorand said in addition to addressing PECO’s response to Hurricane Sandy, the company had started looking into reoccurring outages in neighborhoods here. They started doing this after Hurricane Irene in late summer, 2011.

He said PECO knows there can be other neighborhoods with reoccurring outages.

Dorand said he wants to talk with residents who live in neighborhoods where “electric reliability” is a problem. He said people should tell the township if their neighborhood has a problem. The township then can bring the information to PECO.

“We would gather all of those concerns together, work on them during the months of December and ganuary and hopefully come back in mid-February,” Dorand said.

Board chairman Pete Stainthorpe said the discussion with PECO went very well.

“The public could have been very, very angry and they really weren’t,” he said after the meeting. “Everybody really kept it to the facts.”

Stainthorpe said it was important to have “a constructive discussion” about what PECO could do better and how the township can help.

Supervisor Dan McLauglin said that crews from out of state told him they were

“amazed by the aged infrastructure in the township.”

He said while PEO did a good job explaining their situation and their operations, the utility company has some work to do. “What remains to be seen is how we follow up on this infrastructure,” he said.

“We’ve got to stay on them to see if these infrastructure improvements ac- tually do get made,” Stainthorpe said.

Supervisor Tyler said while she understands that PECO was faced with a “terrific set of storm circumstances and it was really a huge nearly unprecedented storm, my concern is the frustration and lack of information that was provided to our residents and the misinformation provided to our residents concerning power restoration times.

Tyler said the information “gleaned” at the meeting with Ted Dorand “shows that PECO was aware that there would be long-term outages, but chose not to transmit that information to its customers I expect that that won’t occur again.”

Responding to criticism about PECO not telling the public more, Dorand said, “We could have done a better job…There is some room for improvement.”