Off Topic: Enduring the outage.

I've been extremely distracted by the disruptions caused by our little snow storm and the subsequent power outages. I did manage to stay on my eating plan generally, but didn't have the time to track anything since I didn't have computers at home and wanted to save my iPhone battery.  All planning went by the wayside, as we left the freezer doors shut and either ate or tossed everything in the fridges. It's astounding to me how simply time-consuming it was to be without power. All the angst, time spent on hold reporting conditions, checking email when I was away to hear if it had been restored or anybody knew anything, physical visits to houses with no working phones, all of this just sucked up too much of my days and nights. Soon I'll get back on track - it's now Sunday afternoon and I need to turn my thoughts toward planning the week ahead - but I wanted to check in on some overall thoughts about enduring the outage.  Some of this comes from an email I sent my brother (who is a consultant to electric utilities), seeking information about statistics on utility performance.

Folks here are up in arms about the poor performance of our utility, Pepco, after our mere six inches of snow. They are outraged, and there is much testimony about how they never had any power outages before living here. I have to agree I've had a lot more interruptions in service here than ever before. On the whole, though, I'm much more philosophical about it than most - it was a heavy snow, I had three tree branches down in my own yard, on a tree that had been pruned just in December. And for me, three cold nights inside (42 degrees by morning!) and 67 hours total, was truly no more than inconvenient and annoying, not life threatening or dangerous. I've been camping in much worse conditions, I continued to have hot water, and I had enough blankets to sleep cozily. I would have been very cranky if I wasn't warm enough to sleep!  The first night, we all played Risk together and really enjoyed it. We've got flashlights and candle lanterns and battery powered radios. It made us feel like hardy self sufficient pioneers.  I know if I were very old, or had small children, or less money so I didn't have an iphone and the ability to go out to restaurants, it would have been a much bigger deal.  And there were live lines, with sparks, down in wet streets for more than 24 hours before action. Very bad.

It seems to me a lot like the airlines, which is something I know a great deal about. First and foremost, they can't control the weather, but they can and should predict it and get ready for it, and have thought through recovery plans ahead of time, rather than be surprised and reactive. News reports say Pepco didn't request help until after the storm was over and outages were widespread, by which time our neighbors had lined up all the adjacent states so our aid came in from Indiana. Second, providing information to those dis-serviced is totally crucial. After Hurricane Isabel several years ago, Pepco said "everybody will get power back within 8 days" and they did that, and acted surprised that wasn't considered sufficient. But of course no-one cares about "everybody" only themselves. Can you imagine an airline announcement "everyone will be moved within three days" with no other information? Now, Pepco has automated reporting and response, which tries to be more specific. Yet, they were just plain wrong and unhelpful several times over the past few days. They provided an initial outside estimate (11 pm Friday - this they said Thursday morning) and then extended that to 11 pm Sunday just before they hit the Friday deadline. They switched from automated reporting to live people at some point, but didn't leave the option to just do the automation - yet had twenty minute waits to talk to someone.  Since I had to be protective of my cell phone battery life I wasn't going to wait, but could have punched buttons and gotten the info onto their map.  I had a very rude and barely competent person on the phone Friday morning (had to spell my name three times, for example).  Again, extremely annoying and inconvenient, but not dangerous.  These things are management issues that can and should be handled better.  But how about the issue of experiencing the outages in the first place? And the time to repair them?  I can't judge how well they are doing.

After the airlines screwed up publicly a lot in the mid-nineties, the federal government required extensive reporting about their on-time performance, which is published, widely available for consumers to make comparisons, and the basis for a lot of subsequent regulation on passenger protections as well as federal investment decisions about expanding aviation capacity. Working with this data is a big part of my current job. I wonder, is there any similar set of easily accessible and comparable reliability data for electrical supply to consumers? Everyone here has anecdotes about how much worse we are than anywhere else. Airlines constantly complain that you can't compare performance in the snowy and thunderstorm prone northeast to performance in Honolulu, yet the data does get reported and used, with all of the nuances worked through when it matters. Getting the data in consistent and available formats would give us an idea of how much to be outraged, and our politicians some idea about who should pay to do better.  We've got a lot of energetic activist neighbors here in the people's republic of Takoma Park, but I hate regulation by anecdote. Data would be so much better.