Press Release

PUC Hears from Electric Utilities on Hurricane Sandy Outages, Responses

Published on 1/10/2013

Filed under: Electric

HARRISBURG - The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) today heard from the state’s electric utilities whose distribution systems were affected by Hurricane Sandy as part of a Special Electric Reliability Forum.

“What we heard today was a corrective action plan in terms of using social media,” said PUC Chairman Powelson in a video news release. “This was the first time in Pennsylvania that a majority of our utilities were using Twitter and Facebook to communicate with customers, and that was a big frustration we heard back in 2011 with the weather events, so a lot of good lessons learned. But this is still a work in progress, though, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done.”

The following electric companies made presentations, which are available on the PUC website: the FirstEnergy Companies (Metropolitan Edison Co., West Penn Power Co. and Pennsylvania Electric Co.); PECO Energy Co.; PPL Electric Utilities Corp., UGI Utilities Inc., and Pike County Light & Power.

The utilities all reported that Hurricane Sandy was a once-in-a-century storm to hit their service territories, noting that overall, more than 9 million customers across along the East Coast lost power during the event. In general, the utilities reported the following successes:

• Proactively identifying outages;
• Expanded use of social media;
• Utility mutual assistance again played an essential role in ensuring the ability of the companies to respond to the event; and
• Face-to-face customer meetings to personally address customer concerns

In general, the participating electric utilities also reported the following lessons learned including:

• Increasing and implementing additional training opportunities, such as outage management order processing and storm drills;
• Increased consumer education on restoration processes; and
• Reviewing policies for provision of Estimated Restoration Times (ERTs) during extreme events. 

Hurricane Sandy is the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, affecting 24 states. At the height of the hurricane, over 8.3 million customers were without power. Hurricane Sandy hit Pennsylvania on, Oct. 29, 2012.  At the peak of the storm, 1.2 million Pennsylvanians were without power.  Throughout the course of the event, over 1.8 million Pennsylvanians lost power at one time or another with 90 percent of customers having their power restored by Nov. 3, 2012. 

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission balances the needs of consumers and utilities to ensure safe and reliable utility service at reasonable rates; protect the public interest; educate consumers to make independent and informed utility choices; further economic development; and foster new technologies and competitive markets in an environmentally sound manner. For recent news releases, video and audio of select Commission proceedings or more information about the PUC, visit our website at www.puc.pa.gov.

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