Pepco appeared at the October 13th ANC 3B meeting with what will hopefully turn out to be good news for our notoriously unreliable power grid in Glover Park. The seven power outages in the last 20 months put the electric feeder system in our neighborhood among the 2% of least reliable feeder systems in Pepco’s entire service area – meaning that we are now getting some special attention.
According to Chris Taylor, Pepco’s Public Affairs Manager, the company has analyzed the causes of all of our recent power outages. Three were caused by outdated equipment, and the company has since replaced all of this equipment and upgraded other key parts of our feeder system; other outages were caused by falling tree limbs, and in response Pepco has implemented an aggressive tree trimming program in our neighborhood – you’ve probably seen evidence of their work as you walk around the neighborhood.
In addition, Pepco is implementing – as of November 1 – a new switching and connection system that is intended to allow them to switch Glover Park to alternative feeder systems and isolate outage problems when they occur. The goal here is to improve the electric grid so that a single fallen tree branch on Davis Place or 39th Place (or even in Burleith) does not cause an outage in all of Glover Park.
It’s good to know that Pepco is focusing on power outage problems in Glover Park – now let’s hope that over the next year we see evidence that the improvements are working.