BGE was caught flat-footed by a severe thunderstorm last week and the company's response was not enough, according to Del. Pat McDonough.
The Middle River Republican, in a statement released Thursday morning, is calling for an independent evaluation and legislation.
"The people are tired of BGE excuses and lack of information," McDonough wrote in his statement. "The governor and the public service commission must establish a knowledgeable group of experts to study and evaluate the competence of BGE's preparedness and post-storm performance."
McDonough went on to say he will introduce legislation requiring such a study if Gov. Martin O'Malley and the Public Service Commission fail to do so on their own.
McDonough was not immediately available for comment. His statement did not address issues related to PEPCO, which serves Montgomery and Prince George's Counties and Washington DC.
At the height of the outage, more than 1 million customers in Maryland lost power. Both regional power companies estimated that service to all customers would be restored by the end of this week.
As of Thursday morning, BGE reported restoring "92 percent of the more than 700,000 customers who experienced an outage" related to the storm, according to a statement on the company's website.
PEPCO, in a statement Wednesday, says it has restored power to 90 percent of the 443,000 customers affected.
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I did not realize that you, and the public in general from what you say, are such eperts in power line restoration and planning. Since this is the case, then why don't YOU go to work for BG&E and solve all of their planning and workforce allocation and distribution problems? And about that issue of having extra crews on standby. How do you know where and when these storms will cause damage? You must know much more than the National Weather service. They were predicting that multiple thunderstorms were supposed to come through the area on Saturday night into Sunday morning but...NOTHING MATERIALIZED. I'm sure that you knew all of this was going to happen. You really need to go to work for BG&E so that they will know exactly what is going to happen and where the damage will be most prevalent so that YOUR restoration plan can be most effectively put into effect. I may be Superman as you put it, but you, my friend, must be a GENIUS of the highest caliber.
I am not criticizing the work the BGE employees are doing, they are working their tails off - I think perhaps this is an issue of numbers - BGE should have called in some more help!
That way we at least know if they are as stupid as they sound.
I’m sure you sitting in a cool house with your backup generator that kicked on as soon as power went out. If you are concerned about the people w/o power invite them to come to your house.
I also see that name-calling is alive...and should be banned!
I've lived in two other states, both with cheaper power and more prone to big storms, and didn't lose power as often in either of them. Not only did I lose it here for close to a week after a storm, but it briefly flickers off about once or twice a month for no apparent reason, all year long.
I wonder- do they track the locations of the downed wires over time? If there are particular patches (pun intended) of woods where trees always cut the lines, maybe they can either trim those back more or put those lines underground. Or can they have redundant power paths- if the lines go out at one place, some other set of lines can shoulder the load. I don't know enough about the grid configuration to have an answer for that one, or if adding some redundancy would be cost prohibitive.