PECO ramped up its emergency response efforts over the weekend and restored electric service to nearly 120,000 customers in just over 24 hours after heavy rains and howling winds Saturday left widespread damage across the Philadelphia region.
PECO said winds gusted higher than 50 mph for several hours, toppling trees and knocking down utility poles and aerial power lines. Winds remained strong even this morning. The cleanup required first tree crews in many areas, then the utility's line crews to make repairs (re-setting new poles, fixing crossarms, and replacing aerial lines). Sometimes, multiple crews worked for several hours to restore service only to a handful of customers at a time.
Bucks and Montgomery counties sustained the most damage with many communities dealing with significant tree damage in concentrated areas. PECO has restored service to 36,000 in Montgomery County, nearly 30,000 in Bucks, 24,000 in Delaware County, 16,000 in Chester County, 12,000 in Philadelphia, and about 2,000 in York County.
PECO has been assisted today by about 50 Asplundh tree crews and 40 contractor line crews from the Philadelphia area from companies like Henkels & McCoy and M.J. Electric, among others. The company also is bringing in 62 workers from its sister company, ComEd from Chicago (flying in tonight), and 18 personnel from Pittsburgh's Duquesne Light Co. to bolster final clean up efforts on Monday. PECO reached out to these other companies as neighboring utilities are dealing with similar trouble in their service areas.
The storm's damage became several hundred individual outage repair jobs for PECO, many of them involving only small groups of customers. PECO said it prioritized its work based on the critical nature of the cases, like water and sewer facilities and schools, and the number of affected customers, so the events involving larger groups of customers are restored earlier and smaller numbers of customers are out the longest. Any customer in an isolated area or part of a small pocket outage is advised to make personal accommodations until full restoration can be completed.
"We are very pleased with the amount of work we could complete in 24 hours and done safely. The sheer volume of outage cases and the extensive damage has caused full restoration to be extended, and we appreciate everyone's patience. Much of our work has been very labor-intensive and time-consuming, said Mike Innocenzo, PECO vice president and emergency response director.
Based in Philadelphia, PECO is an electric and natural gas utility subsidiary of Exelon Corporation (NYSE: EXC). PECO serves 1.6 million electric and 480,000 natural gas customers in southeastern Pennsylvania and employs about 2,500 people in the region. PECO delivered 78.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 39.9 billion kilowatt-hours-hours of electricity in 2007. Founded in 1881, PECO is one of the Greater Philadelphia Region's most active corporate citizens, providing leadership, volunteer and financial support to numerous arts and culture, education, environmental, economic development and community programs and organizations.
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