It’s easy to pile on Pepco.
The regional power utility took nearly 10 days to restore power to thousands of homes in Montgomery County after Snowmageddon in 2010.
In 2011, when another significant snowstorm hit, more than 136,000 Pepco customers were without power at one time.
But it was a different story this time when less than 1,000 customers lost power in the county during last weekend’s snowstorm, which dumped from 18 to 39 inches of snow. A majority of those outages were caused by a tree falling in Takoma Park and knocking down a power line and utility pole. However, that outage lasted only hours, not days.
“We see this as the first test of the winter storm season and thankfully we passed it with flying colors,” Vincent Morris, Pepco’s regional communications director, said Tuesday afternoon.
He said the utility has invested more than $650 million since 2010 to improve its regional power network. A significant amount of that investment went toward trimming trees near power lines, which generated controversy from county residents who say the utility is unnecessarily mutilating and cutting down too many trees.
“[Tree trimming] sometimes has turned into an issue where there’s high emotions, but in nearly every case our goal has been to reduce the likelihood and eliminate it all together that anyone in our service area loses power,” Morris said.
Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett said Tuesday the trimming may have helped during the snowstorm, but other factors were at play as well. He pointed to lower-than-expected wind speeds and the lightness of the snow as factors contributing to keeping the power on.
“They were pre-positioned and I’m very delighted to see they were very proactive in this situation and we did not have as many power outages,” Leggett said during a news conference. “Otherwise, that would have been one of the other things we would’ve been talking about.”
Morris admitted that the type of snow may have helped Pepco avoid significant outages.
“If you’re concerned about making sure there’s no power interruptions, it’s beneficial if Mother Nature serves up light, fluffy snow,” Morris said.
Montgomery County Council member Roger Berliner, who has been a fierce critic of the utility after frequent outages over the past several years, said legislation he championed forced the utility to improve.
“I do think that the reforms I helped bring about that hold Pepco financially accountable for reliability have had a very positive impact,” Berliner said. “At the same time, the storm may not have been a true test of Pepco’s resiliency because the snow was as light as it was and the winds were not as severe as predicted.”
In 2011, the Maryland legislature passed the Electric Reliability Act, which Berliner helped draft and was sponsored by Del. Brian Feldman (D–Potomac). The law requires Pepco to maintain high standards of reliability or else face financial penalties.
“Utilities are like Jesse James—they follow the money,” Berliner said.
However, even Berliner said it was a “big deal” on his Facebook page that Pepco kept the power on in the county through the storm. “Imagine this storm with no power,” Berliner wrote Sunday.
He added in an interview Wednesday that while tree trimming may have helped this time, the utility’s “Paul Bunyan approach” to cutting trees in the area has been “very disturbing for many neighborhoods.”
In Takoma Park, Pepco received accolades from Public Works Director Daryl Braithwaite, who saw firsthand the utility’s response to its power outage Saturday afternoon when a tree knocked down a power line as it fell across Poplar Avenue next to Spring Park.
She said the tree landed on high-tension wires, knocking out power for hundreds of residents, just as the blizzard picked up.
“Within seriously 30 or 40 minutes Pepco crews were on site,” Braithwaite said. “They had about seven pieces of equipment down there and were able to deal with a lot of things at once.”
She said before those crews even arrived, other crews responded along the power line to restore power to transformers that had stopped working when the line went down.
“It was just one of those benefits of nothing else in the system going down so they had resources they could throw at it,” Braithwaite said. “The snowstorm got bad that afternoon, too, and they worked through the worst of the blizzard and didn’t slow down at all.”
By 9 p.m., power was completely restored, about eight hours after the tree fell. Braithwaite, who had also lost power in the outage, said it was a “treat” to watch the utility’s crews work.
Overall, Morris said Pepco dealt with “next to nothing” statistically in terms of outages. He said the utility serves 2.3 million people in the region and during the storm had no more than a few hundred customers experiencing outages at any given time.
In Pepco’s control center, Morris said there were a number of happy employees.
“As the storm rolled in here on Friday and into Saturday, we saw that even though inches and feet of snow were piling up, we weren’t losing customers,” Morris said. “There were high fives and we felt quite good that all of our hard work was paying off.”
