Power Company Woes in the Northeast

Surely people understand that when there are millions of customers without power, certain areas will wait longer for their power to be restored as opposed to other cities and towns. It is just a matter of who is in an area that resulted in a larger-scaled outage; for instance, towns with a lower percentage of lines down, as opposed to places where there are trees across roads, poles down, etc. Those in the Northeast don't care though. They just want their power back as there are still hundreds of thousands of people struggling in the dark because their houses are cold, their food has long been spoiled and ruined, and the nasty conditions have prompted many people to threaten to take action against the power companies throughout the hardest hit states in the Northeast.

The rare October nor'easter that blasted parts of the Northeast with anywhere from a couple of inches to two feet of snow last Saturday, knocked out power to over three million people during the peak of the storm, and with the slow restoration process, the storm was to blame for over 20 deaths (and counting). One couple in New Jersey was found dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning; Robert and Susanna Stephens, of Holland Township, were only trying to keep warm as New Jersey-based power company, JCP&L, worked on finally restoring power to their street. Unfortunately, it was too late. Reportedly, there have been eight deaths in New Jersey because of the storm.

Normally a storm of this magnitude, in the middle of winter, wouldn't cause millions of power outages, however due to the leaves still on the trees in many locations in the Northeast, the trees couldn't handle the weight of the heavy, but also wet, snow pulling the leaf-covered branches down onto the power lines. This storm in January would be more of a nuisance compared to what it did to so many cities and towns in the Northeast recently.

With this storm, as well as the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, which occurred about two months before this one, many people are concerned with the lack of contingency planning by power companies. One example is in Connecticut, where there still remains over 150,000 people without power. The state's largest electric utility company, CL&P, has been receiving thousands of nasty messages, both online and via verbal threats, as customers simply don't believe that their power will be restored by Sunday evening.

"I'm not happy, but I don't have the power to seize that (speaking of CL&P) company," Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy mentioned at a briefing Saturday morning.

In New Jersey, Governor Christie had vacillated between the near-confident mentioning of JCP&L's original restoration deadline of Thursday (by midnight) and the problems arising due to people receiving phone calls that their power had been restored, but the power was still out. As of 9:00 pm, Saturday, there were still over 5,000 JCP&L customers without power, as well as over 1000 PSE&G customers, and for the unlucky customers without power, they've had enough.

It becomes a personal problem when customers are literally hurt by the inability of their power companies' to restore their power when they can't work and make money, lose food because they can't refrigerate it, or even worse, fall sick because of the conditions caused by power outages

There have been numerous comments posted online where customers would like to sue the power companies for the damage caused by the slow restoration; however there is another side to this. There are the people that back the power companies. Do customers really have a chance at getting back at the utility companies that control their electricity? I read somewhere that if over 100,000 customers filed cases in small claims court, it could get interesting. This is again, just a theory…

Frustration grows immensely if customers are without power for even an hour, let alone days, so it is understandable that there are a multitude of stressed out customer comments on the Internet. What needs to be done though is a major assessment of the numerous power company contingency plans. In the 21^st century, where just about everyone is majorly dependent on electricity due to the massive strides made in technological advancements, it's just unnecessary for areas to be out of power for a week or more.