Residents of Buck Ridge Meadows Air Their Grievances Before PECO

Representatives from PECO met with a throng of frustrated Upper Southampton residents in the township meeting room Monday Evening.

The group gathered to address the residents' grievances over frequent losses of electricity through the years.  

The issue has been a consistent one for residents of the Buck Ridge Meadows neighborhood, specifically those living on Stephen Way and Joan and Nancy Drives.  

Residents told PECO representatives that the problem has been going on for more than 15 years now. To make matters worse, the residents said when they lose power, they lose it for an extended period of time. 

“A lot of us have generators because of this,” said Judi Braunston, who lives on Nancy Drive and first contacted the township about meeting with PECO.   We’ll lose power six, seven, eight times a year.  We’ve always had [the power outages], but nobody ever did anything about it.”

Braunston got in touch with township manager Joe Golden, who reserved the library’s meeting space and contacted PECO’s Bucks County External Affairs Manager, Theodore Dorand. 

Dorand did most of the talking during the meeting, saying the main goal was to gather everyone’s information and addresses so PECO could begin to analyze the problem.  

He noted the significant snow and ice storms, dry heat, and precipitation over the last two years.  

“We’ve had two back-to-back significant weather years that have caused a lot of reliability problems,” said Dorand.  

"Normally, in this area, we average 28-30 inches of rain over the course of the year.  We’ve had twice that amount in the past six months," he said.  "All of it has impacted our reliability.” 

Dorand’s talk of recent weather concerns seemed to fall on deaf years, as most of the people who gathered in the meeting room have been dealing with this problem for decades.  

“This is a bull#$&* session!”, said one man as he got up to leave.  “For the past 15 years this has been a continual sequence of events.”

Braunston said the weather doesn't even need to be that harsh for the neighborhood to lose power.

“We lose electricity when there’s a light breeze,” she said.  

“The electricity goes out a lot of the time for no reason at all.  When nothing is going on we lose power.  There doesn‘t have to be a storm or high wind - sometimes it just goes,” she added.

Although Dorand said they couldn’t give the residents a specific time table for the problem to be resolved, he said they would be hearing from the energy company in the near future.  

“We’ll huddle together and figure out a reasonable time when we can get back to you,” said Dorand.  “Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet but there are things we can do to make it better.”

Dorand advised residents to directly contact PECO every time they have a power outage in order to help them diagnose the problem.