PEPCO über-FAIL

So, we are currently at 18 hours post-Irene and more than 24 since the power went out and still without power.  PEPCO has managed to restore power to every street in my neighborhood and even the Springbrook Forest neighborhood next to us…but my street (and the two side streets off of mine) are still dark.  This flies in the face of PEPCO’s alleged strategy as they have it on their webpage:

Restoration efforts will first address public health and safety issues, then focus on repairs that can restore large groups of customers, followed by restoration of circuit servings neighborhoods and streets.

Our area-based approach means that crews will stay in an area until all customers are restored.

Clearly, if everyone around my street has had power restored and we haven’t then PEPCO is not following this approach.  And what is more frustrating is when I try calling their outage line (1-877-737-2662) it either gives me a busy signal or it just drops the connection.   According to PEPCO – as of this morning, 7:09 AM EDT the status of the outage on my street is as follows:

• Customers Affected: 98
• Cause: Unknown
• Crew Staus: No Crew Assigned – Outage being evaluated.
• Estimated Restoration:

Unbelievable!  This was reported yesterday and they’re still claiming that the outage is “being evaluated” with no estimated restoration time.   You’d think that the crews that were working on Kemp Mill Road or Springbrook Forest could have made a modicum of effort to take a look at my road and say “Hey…they don’t have power!”  But apparently they didn’t.  According to PEPCO they don’t know what the cause of the power outage is – probably because their crew didn’t bother to look!  At the very least PEPCO, show that you’re paying attention!  How about I do this – I will evaluate my next bill payment to you.  My estimated time to pay it is: __.  The cause?  I think you should be able to guess that for yourselves – it should be fairly self-evident.