The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

Local News

September 19, 2008

Power outage sparks customer frustration

By Michael Roknick

MERCER COUNTY — After more than four days without power, Judy Nych blew an emotional fuse Friday morning.

The Hermitage resident said she was initially told by Pennsylvania Power Co. electricity to her home would be restored early in the week.

Then she learned the company was saying getting her lights back on would take longer because last weekend’s storm damage was worse than crews realized.

“For them to say they were unaware of the situation really upset me,’’ Ms. Nych said. “How could you not be aware of the situation? When I have it rubbed in my face they weren’t aware how bad it was ... Grrrrrrrrrr!”

The remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania Sunday night, leaving nearly a million customers of FirstEnergy Corp. without power. The company’s Penn Power unit initially said 27,000 Mercer County residents were without electricity. But Scott Surgeonor, a FirstEnergy spokesman, said Friday the company revised Mercer County’s top outage figure to between 35,000 and 40,000.

He acknowledged, the new figure could include duplicates and customers in Crawford County who are served from the utility’s Clark operation.

Penn Power has 160,000 customers in all of Mercer and Lawrence counties and sections of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Crawford counties.

Using FirstEnergy figures, Surgeonor said, the utility now believes up to three-fourths of its Penn Power customers — as many as 120,000 — could have been without power since the storm.

Penn Power said that as of Friday afternoon 800 of its Mercer County customers were still without power and it could be until Sunday before electricity is restored to all of them.

Ms. Nych said she hopes Penn Power is feeling the heat from its customers because she had to move out of her home on Monday.

“I have no water. No electricity. Nothing,’’ she said.

Tony Zucco, area manager for Penn Power, said the company is working as fast as it can.

“In all my 32 years with the company I’ve never had an outage last beyond four days,’’ Zucco said. “I’ve never seen it this bad.’’

After a typical severe storm the utility always has been able to repair downed live wires within 24 hours, he said.

“This wasn’t a normal storm,’’ Zucco said. “The damage was so far reaching and so extensive we couldn’t get to them for a couple days.’’

Further compounding the utility’s woes is the number of damaged substations; a substation can feed power to thousands of customers.

“In this storm it would have been easier to count the number of substations that didn’t get damaged,’’ Zucco said.

A number of callers to The Herald complained they had utility crews in their neighborhoods who left without completing repairs, leaving them in the dark.

“We brought in a number of people to just assess what the situation was in an area,’’ Zucco explained. “They may have had hard hats on, but these were often not people who were trained to repair electrical outages.’’

Another complaint was that utility crews would repair a downed line, yet nearby homeowners were still without power.

“That line could serve hundreds of homes,’’ Zucco said. “We need to fix that main power line first to restore as many people as we can and then we’ll go back to each home without power to find out what’s wrong.’’





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