Venting at Pepco Continues

Montgomery County residents and a parade of elected officials spoke Monday night in front of Maryland's Public Service Commission for a public hearing on reliability of Pepco's delivery of power and storm response.

"It's an incompetence of management," said Harvey Klein, a resident of the county for 37 years. "There's no other word for it."

The meeting, interrupted twice by audio problems, lasted several hours, two of which were taken up by elected officials from all levels of government.

A common theme in their testimony was the frustration of their constituents both before and after the storms, as well as disbelief that heavy summer storms and fallen trees were the only reason for widespread and frequent outages.

"Residents in Hillandale, Silver Spring and Wheaton called me to report that they are consistently some of the last neighborhoods to have their power restored in Montgomery County," said Montgomery County Councilwoman Valerie Ervin (D-District 5). She reported that these outages lasted an average of five to seven days before restoration.

During the first day of outages, Pepco's website reported that more than 15,000 residences were without power in Wheaton — virtually all of their customers in the zip code.

County Councilwoman Duchy Trachtenberg (D-At Large) said that the lack of power over a long period of time was essentially a public health crisis.

"I don't trust Pepco anymore," she said.

In addition to speaking about the after effects of storms, many residents commented that power outages happen regularly in their neighborhoods, often without any weather incidents.

Maryland State Delegate Alfred C. Carr (D-District 18), whose constituents live in Wheaton, Kensington and parts of Silver Spring, said a business owner in his district has had power go out 22 times in the store since June. Carr also asked specifically that Pepco be more transparent, including putting reports and other documents online and making them searchable.

As part of the investigation into the response to the summer storms, Pepco admitted that they have fallen into the lowest quartile of reliability on a national level for the past four years.

Both elected officials and members of the public asked the commission why they had not forced Pepco to update their infrastructure. Multiple representatives called for the commission to provide regular oversight of Pepcp's procedures and service, not simply its rate hikes. Several testimonies suggested linking Pepco's rate with quality of service.

Mike Moore, owner of the Royal Mile Pub in Wheaton, was one of the first residents to testify. Although Moore has a generator that kept Royal Mile Pub open and its food safe during the power outages, he was frustrated by what he heard from his customers.

"We actually became a refuge for the citizens there," he said, explaining that he had let people cool down at the pub until it was closed, and allowed them to charge their electrical equipment.

Moore's complaints on the utility also go beyond the storm response. He said that Pepco arbitrarily changed the amount of kilowatt hours from a past bill and then charged him $10,000 as an "adjustment." Moore has hired a master electrician to do an independent assessment of how much power his business is actually using each month.

The commission will hold another public hearing on Pepco in Prince George's County on Thursday in Largo.