Niles, MG Like ComEd's Plan For Storm Outages

Remember last summer? The power outages, homes flooding because sump pumps lost power, and food spoiling in refrigerators?

And no one knew when the power was going to come back on?

ComEd announced a plan Wednesday to better work with suburban governments when widespread outages occur. 

Ryan Horne, Morton Grove's village administrator, thought the plan had promise.

"Of course we hope we don't ever have a power outage," he said, "but we hope what they have in place now will work out better."

Niles Village Manager George Van Geem also was hopeful.

"Three important issues during any prolonged outage have always been communication, communication and communication," he said. "I believe this new information partnership will be very helpful during storm events."

The village worked closely with a ComEd municipal liaison to make its needs known as ComEd formulated its plan, he said. 

ABC7 reported ComEd plans to set up 17 joint operations centers, or temporary offices, in order to better keep information flowing to municipalities in the event of storms and outages. 

The joint operations centers will be set up within hours of a storm knocking out power to significant numbers of residents, ComEd said in a statement.  They will be triggered when more than 20 percent of customers in an area are without power for three hours or more, according to the Chicago Tribune. 

ComEd also plans to let customers report outages, and receive responses, via smartphone apps and texting. It has also developed a $1 million mobile command center, which it said can be deployed to hard-hit areas during outages. 

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