Ward 11/Abington Township friends, I am so, SO sorry that the six-hour time difference between home and Germany delayed the word getting to me about the latest thunderstorm-related widespread outage disaster. (For those who dont know, I am helping to chaperone my wifes exchange students—three dozen great young people who go to Abington Senior High School.) But I just made several calls to PECO and to the Abington Police Department, and all of the latest updates I have are in my newsletter at icontact-archive/OBEMGylzLCXqMych9I4ZArFIzEk2ykQ_?w=2. You dont have to be an electrical engineer or the COO of a power company (Im sure not either of these things!) to recognize that there is something systemically WRONG when our community—and, in fact, communities all over southeastern Montgomery County and throughout PECOs entire service area—suffer widespread outages on such a regular basis. Last Februarys ice storm was clearly an unprecedented disaster that happened to hit Abington unusually hard, but the two thunderstorms that occurred in the last six days—while certainly strong and also indicative of the increasing volatility in our weather—werent exactly epic hurricanes. And yet large and concentrated swaths of Abington Township (and, to be clear, other municipalities in our area) were knocked off the grid. Why? In contrast, overnight thunderstorms—big ones, as fierce as anything we get at home—hit this part of Germany our first night here. Not a single light even flickered? Why not? Although this is probably somewhat of an oversimplification, I would think its mostly due to the fact that the power lines here are UNDERGROUND, the way that they are in most new construction in many parts of America, including much of the Northeast Corridor. Many folks will recall that in the days following the ice storm in February, PECO sent a team of customer service reps. to the Township Building to try to help the many, many folks throughout our Township who were without power during those cold days. I spent several days with those PECO reps., bothering them (politely, of course) and advocating for the Ward 11 folks who were still without power. This got the attention of PECOs Montgomery County Rep., who called me during this period. We had a long and pointed (though mutually respectful) conversation about the fact that our weather is getting harsher, more unpredictable, ultimately more threatening to the overhead line system that represents much of the power grid in our region and our country. We agreed on that point, but not on what to do about it: • I shared my opinion that for PECO—and ultimately its parent company, Midwest-based Exelon—the only real option is to begin investing now, gradually and according to a plan created and vetted by their engineers and operations management people, in burying their power lines. This would surely take a long time, be very expensive, and require a lot of cooperation/negotiation/creative wrangling with various levels of government, a great many private property owners, and lots of utility companies that already have their systems underground. But the sooner they craft a plan and get started as part of their standard operations, the sooner theyll finish and everyone can reap the benefits of a far more secure and reliable power grid. • The PECO rep. disagreed, arguing that burying the lines would be too logistically difficult, time-consuming, and expensive and that it wouldnt solve every problem. Instead, she recommended that every homeowner understand that they need to invest in emergency generators—along with flashlights, batteries, bottles of water, etc.—as part of their basic emergency planning. Setting aside for a moment the important point that many folks—here in Ward 11 and Abington Township, not to mention throughout the entire country—live in apartments and cant use generators, I strongly disagree with the PECO Rep.s assessment. Generators can be an extremely important part of individual homeowners emergency planning and management. This is especially true for folks who have medical conditions and other needs that make power outages particularly dangerous for them. However, given that utility companies have as their very reason for being the massive-scale responsibility of supplying an entire populations electricity, it seems unworkable and even ludicrous for them to, in effect, outsource this to whole bunch of gasoline-powered generators every time a storm hits. Moreover, any unwillingness to invest in a transition from antiquated and vulnerable overhead cables to secure and far more reliable underground lines presents a singular threat to the longterm wellbeing of Abington Township and the many first-ring/old-growth suburbs like it. In reading the MANY Facebook posts about this latest storm outage, Ive seen many statement to the effect of I just moved to Abington a few months ago, and this is the third long outage weve had. Nobody told me I had to buy a generator to live here comfortably. As a governing body, one of the most complex and important responsibilities of your Board of Commissioners is to plan for the future growth and development of our Township. We must make decisions, large and small, with an eye towards keeping our municipality a high-quality and desirable community—a place to move to, to raise a family, to grow up in and grow old in. But it will create a heavy burden on homeowners, real estate agents, and everyone else if people think that in order to live in Abington, they have to make special, complex, and expensive arrangements just to maintain one of the most essential services of all. That is completely unacceptable. Abington Township is one of the very best places to live (and that has nothing to do with any awards or placards), and we deserve far better than that from our power company. With this in mind, I am going to explore every possible avenue—and enlist help from every possible level of government—to convince PECO/Exelon to develop a forward-thinking plan to improve and protect our fundamental utility service and the most basic level of its own infrastructure, a plan that involves more than re-hanging fragile cables on old poles, suggesting that people buy generators, and hoping for better weather. Im not sure if such a plan necessarily involves burying lines—there might be a completely different and far better approach. But PECO/Exelon must show us that they HAVE a plan, and then they must EXECUTE that plan. Because theres no reason that our children should have to hear stories from their grandparents—stories told by candlelight!—about the good old days when the power used to be on most of the time. Thanks, as always, for listening.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:37:40 +0000