Monday, August 2, 2010

Montgomery Council Asks Maryland Public Service Commission to Investigate Pepco’s ‘Reliability of Electricity’

County’s Letter to MPSC Chair Asks ‘Whether or Not Pepco Has Sufficient In-house Staff to Maintain its Infrastructure

ROCKVILLE, Md., July 29, 2010—The Montgomery County Council today unanimously signed a letter to the Maryland Public Service Commission asking for “an investigation into the reliability of electricity in Pepco’s Montgomery County’s service territory.” More than 200,000 County homes were left without electricity for various periods following a sudden storm on Sunday, July 25. Many homes were still without power as the Council signed the letter five days later.

“Our residents and businesses have suffered an unacceptable number and duration of outages for many years, outages that have harmed public health, public safety and the County’s economy,” reads the letter addressed to Douglas R.M. Nazarian, Chairman of the Maryland Public Service Commission. “As a distribution-only utility, the quality and reliability of Pepco’s service is exclusively within your authority. We ask you to invoke that authority to ensure our citizens of acceptable levels of reliability.”

The letter also cites that Montgomery County suffers isolated power outages even when major winter or other storms are not the cause. “And this happens all too often,” the letter states, “leading us to ask whether or not Pepco has sufficient in-house staff to maintain its infrastructure.”

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