By Michelle Durham

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The PECO Emergency Operations Command Center is a hive of activity as Hurricane Sandy inches closer to the Delaware Valley.

PECO’s Director of Communications Karen Muldoon Geus says all field personnel have been put on alert. Crews from outside the area placed on stand-by and inside the operations center, high-level planning meetings every few hours.

“What they talk about is how we deal with our critical customers, the first customers we put back on line, 911 centers, hospitals.”

There is an order in which customers are restored. After the critical customers, “We try to get the circuits on next that have the most amount of customers and then we move on to the next-sized circuit.”

But she points out, it’s the seasoned personnel who monitor the outages and communicate closely with field personnel who make this happen.

If you experience an outage you can call PECO at 215-841-4141. There’s also a new app you can download for your Smartphone.