BGE Gets an Earful at Town Hall Meeting With Customers

A Thursday night meeting hosted by State Sen. Ed Reilly (R-Crofton) brought Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) customer service and technical representatives to the . In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, many residents had complained to Reilly that the restoration of power in the area was simply taking too long.

BGE apologized to customers and used the forum to explain how, exactly, their customer service and outage maps work.

Bonnie Johansen, BGE/Constellation Energy liaison to the county said that telephone calls reporting outages are how their crews know where to go.

She said that critical services, hospitals, police, and other necessary support systems are brought back online first—especially after a storm with widespread outages.

“Outage reporting relies on people calling in. The more people calling in helps give information about how widespread the outage is. Is it one house, one side of the street, the whole neighborhood, the whole city?” Johansen said.

She added that customers should then call each day they are without power.

“Sometimes they will make a repair [techs in the field], and think that its hooked up 1,000 houses. But, a transformer or a fuse down the line has a problem and only 50 people are back on,” Johansen said.

In that case, BGE doesn’t know that all 1,000 people are not back on.

“We truly don’t know,” she said. “People should call in once a day until they are restored.”

Johansen added that once BGE gets “smart meters” in place they will be able to use the technology to spot outages. Until then, it is a people-generated system.

Smart meters are only now beginning to come into use.

A question of burying lines came up at the meeting, but the cost is prohibitive at over $1 million per mile of line to move it underground, although most neighborhoods since the 1980s have their power underground.

Some neighbors in the community came to discuss specific problems. Cheval Trails in Davidsonville has been one of the neighborhoods suffering from repeated power outages.

“If the wind blows, our power goes out,” one of the attendees to the meeting said.

BGE said that it was trying to work with the neighborhood noting that seven outages since the beginning of 2011 is too many.  They are trying to isolate the cause and make the necessary repairs.

Others questioned why line maintenance and tree-cutting wasn’t more of a priority for BGE. BGE countered that under the law, they are not permitted to remove more than a 25 percent of a tree.

“Is it more important to have a tree than to have power?” an attendee who identified himself as “Joe” said, suggesting that Reilly propose a bill in the state Senate to give BGE wider latitude in taking down entire trees.

Reilly said that his suggestion was “duly noted,” while Bonnie said that there are more bills in the General Assembly with support to leave trees standing.

But she said that BGE can work with homeowners to get rid of nuisance trees near power lines with their permission.  Otherwise the area is on a four-year cycle for trimming, with spot trims conducted as necessary.

One customer complained that expenses incurred due to a power surge were not reimbursed by BGE, which frustrated the homeowner since $4,000 of damage was done to items in the home.

Chris Reif, supervisor for field reliability and investigations for BGE said that the compensation tariff—negotiated by the Public Service Commission—does not require BGE to compensate homeowners except in very specific circumstances. 

Johansen added that this extends to food spoilage due to power outages.

Johansen said that special needs customers are given priority service during a typical outage. She said that if there are specific medical needs that require electricity, those homes can be identified in the BGE database and given priority service.

Customers with medical issues need to contact customer service to get a form signed by a physician. Once the form is returned, those houses are highlighted in the database for priority restoration.

Johansen noted that during storm recovery with widespread outages, those homes may not get priority service, but at most times they would be dealt with first.

Johansen also wanted customers to know that BGE maintains light poles, once the county or a developer installs them. 

“Simply go online. There is a place on our website where you can either put the road and the nearest intersection of the pole, or if you know it, the pole number,” Johansen said.

Reif said that so far, they’ve conducted eight such town hall meetings with customers since Tropical Storm Irene and Lee.

At the end of the night Reif said that the 40 or so attendees had good questions.

“It was a good interaction with the customers and now I have some things to look into,” he said, tapping a stack of notes.