Pepco: FAIL

Got this e-mail from Jim Graham this evening. It has since been somewhat annotated.

Dear Friends:

The Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC) has asked the D.C. Public Service Commission (PSC) to investigate complaints from residents that their energy bills are unexpectedly higher than normal this winter.

The OPC has received complaints from a number of sources and local news outlets have reported on the issue.  Residents have complained that Pepco has not given a clear explanation for the high bills.

Also, the PSC will investigate the root cause of a power outage on February 20 that affected thousands of residents and traffic signals in Ward 1 and Ward 2.

Pepco reported that the outage was caused by an equipment failure at the 10th Street substation.  Pepco reported 4,125 customers were affected.  By 10:15 a.m. power was restored to 2,325 customers.  Power was restored to the remaining customers later that night.  The Kennedy Recreation Center was used as warming station.

Pepco is required to issue a report on the incident within five business days.

The PSC is already investigating an outage that happened downtown on June 13, 2008.  That outage was also caused by a problem at the 10th Street substation.

Pepco issued a report on that incident which included measures to avoid future outages.  The PSC is monitoring Pepco’s use of those measures.

Bests,

Councilmember Jim Graham

“Bests”? Way to pluralize incorrectly, Jimbo. It’s a shame, by the way, that the reports that Pepco is required to issue no more than five days after an incident are not easily or readily available to their customers. Sure, a cursory search in Google or Yahoo will yield the results you’re probably looking for, but does it really need to be that difficult?

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a little tired of using Google as the middle man to search a specific domain to make up for what the site is lacking in user interface. Sure, Google is absolutely terrific at what it does most of the time, but to me this says something much bigger about the website: it needs to be more easily searchable.  (Is that even a word? I don’t care.)

Pepco, all we’re asking is that you get it together long enough to power the city without having a major glitch at a substation (specifically the 10th Substation, if possible) resulting in a loss of power to thousands of customers.

Pretty please?