PECO Crews Help Many Customers, But Not All See The Light
By Dan Wing
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Monday marks the 6th day without power for tens of thousands of people living in the Philadelphia area, as PECO continues work to get everyone back to normal following last week's storm.
Heading into the overnight hours, the utility was reporting just over 20,000 remaining outages, a significant drop from Saturday.
PECO repair crews continue to work around the clock, some logging 16 hour shifts, as they try to get the remaining customers back on the grid. They've made good progress, getting the total number of outages down under 30,000 for the first time since the storm hit on Wednesday.
While the original estimated restoration date may have come and gone for some, PECO spokeswoman Kathy Engle Menendez says you have to remember that those are just estimations based on initial surveys of the damage:
"A couple days ago we may have known of one location of damage and given them an estimated restoration time of, for example, 11 o'clock Friday. After that work was repaired, and we attempted to re-energize service, when we know that it doesn't re-energize the entire circuit, we know there's other areas of repairs that need to be made to reconnect that system."
She says the utility knows people without power are frustrated, but asked them to keep in mind just how tough of a job the repair crews are facing:
"When our crews go on site, they have to clear snow banks, they have to remove large piles of snow before they can even set up their work site, then when they get up in the air in their bucket trucks, before they even can begin to make repairs, they're chipping ice off of equipment and moving ice so it's making the restoration work that much more challenging and take that much longer."
PECO is hoping to have the remaining outages fixed in the very near future, but admit that some may linger for a few more days.
