PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — PECO has almost finished restoring power for customers affected by last week’s severe thunderstorms, but there are still hundreds of people who don’t have electricity.
The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the outage left thousands without power and air conditioning ahead of a sweltering heat wave that has blanketed the northeastern part of the country with triple-digit temperatures.
PECO said the storm was historic, with damaging wind gusts up to 70 mph. However, the head of IBEW Local 614, the union representing more than 1,400 PECO workers, said the company’s response to the storm was poor.
Union president Larry Anastasi said it shouldn’t take five-plus days to restore power to all customers affected by the June 19 weather event.
“A storm like this would’ve been back on much sooner,” he said. “This isn’t that big a storm. When I was coming up, this was an average storm. This is now considered catastrophic to PECO.”
In a statement, PECO said this was one of the top 20 worst storms in the company’s history, and it assembled one of the largest contingents of workers to deal with extensive damage, including crews from nine other states.
However, Anastasi said out-of-state contractors don’t get sufficient resources to acclimate to a new environment. And, he said, troubles arise when dispatch has to communicate with such a large array of work crews, and there aren’t as many experienced veterans on the ground to help incoming contracted crews get their bearings.
“Management employees that were in the field would give the contractors storm kits, they would have work assignments for them. Now, everyone reports to the dispatchers. They’re overwhelmed. They’re sending multiple crews to the same location, which is very dangerous,” he said.
“Sometimes crews wait hours to get back to the dispatcher and they can’t get through to them, which means they can’t energize what they just worked on. They call in for more work, they can’t get it.”
In its statement, PECO commended everyone who responded to the storms, including IBEW Local 614 back office and line workers. The company said it is committed to around-the-clock work until full service is restored.