I just spent the past 73 hours without power
in my house. In a blizzard. More if you count the 8 hours we lost
power, and then it came back on for 8 hours, just to lose it again, for
73 hours, straight. And what I encountered during that time was a
complete failure by our electric company to communicate any information as to what was going on or when we were going to be able to get our electricity back.
At
first, it was ok. Sure, it was boring and cold and annoying. But I
kept calling the outage line to be told by an automated machine they
had no restoration times and I understood. We were in the middle of a
blizzard. Snowpocalypse the DC area was calling it. So we light a
fire and hunkered down and then I started tweeting on my iPhone.
I found lots of my friends didn't have power either. I found the Pepco twitter page,
whose tweets went from the aggravating to the downright bizarre, like,
if you don't have power, you should leave, while emergency personnel
were telling everyone, WHITEOUT CONDITIONS, GET OFF THE ROAD. And
every time I called the Pepco outage line, I never got a restoration
time.
One by one I watched on twitter while everyone got their power back, but me, and my friend Amy.
And after about 24 hours, when our streets had been plowed, we started
calling hotels to discover that they were all filled by power outage
refugees. The local power outage shelter wouldn't let us take our dog
and I refused to leave him in the freezing cold. Luckily, my best
friend's roads were passable, not great, but passable, and we loaded up
the car and the dog and headed over there. I will be eternally
grateful for the warmth she provided us because at this point we were
simply, freezing. And I watched Pepco tweet what a great job they were
doing.
While at my friend's I finally got a restoration time that
put us at a full week without power, and we were slowly closing in at
three days at my friend's house, with sick two year old twins. I felt
as if I couldn't impose on my friend that long, and my parent's private
road had recently been plowed. So after 2 days at my friend's (and one
futile trip back to our house on icy roads when Pepco called and told
us we had power and we didn't) we packed it up and went to my parent's,
where they proceeded to lose power. They called Pepco, where they
promptly, received no information.
Are we sensing a pattern
here? We went home. We needed to check on the house anyway as our
roof has been leaking (I know) and at this point, we were out of
choices. As we pulled into the neighborhood, we noticed all of our
neighbors huddled outside starring at A PEPCO TRUCK. I walked over and
asked them how long. "It should be a few minutes." And, after 73
hours plus 8, it was.
We had about 14 hours of uninterrupted
power when we lost it again for about 30 minutes, at which point I
called Pepco again to be told, nothing, rudely. We had now lost power
3 times and they were being rude to me. They had no idea why we lost
power again. Luckily it was restored rather quickly. And we are not
out of the power woods yet. We still have high winds today and they
say they may have more outages.
Look, I know the system was
stressed by the recent storm and I was not the only person this
happened to. But over 73 hours without power, a freezing 4 year old, a
leaky roof, and NO ANSWERS, it is enough to make you go insane. Pepco
is the only deal in town and there has to be some accountability and
some change that comes from this. This cannot happen again. Pepco has
to be able to answer questions when you call. At least give you a
reasonable time frame for when you can have your power back on.
Because just saying it will be a week to shut you up? Unacceptable.
