City Council Meets with Pepco over Outages

A lot of Greenbelt trees will be affected by power line upgrades designed to reduce power outages, Pepco power line designer James Dudley said at the Greenbelt City Council on Wednesday.

Dudley said one reason is that the upgrade will involve adding new telephone poles to reduce the distance between poles and that Maryland requires new poles to be 10 feet longer than the old poles.  This means that the poles will reach higher into trees and require more tree trimming.

He said they are also installing "tree wires" that are insulated to minimize automatic shutoffs when tree limbs fall on them.

Dudley is focusing on feeder lines that carry power to Greenbelt from two substations. He said he is redesigning two feeder lines he thinks are the main culprits in power outages, using heavier wire.

He said the costs of underground lines in historic Greenbelt are prohibitive. Mayor Judith "J" Davis said that most of Greenbelt East has underground lines.

She also wondered why squirrels were no longer being blamed for outages. Dudley answered that Pepco now puts two "squirrel guards" on transformers rather than just one. 

As far as the outages council asked about, on July 8 and Aug. 1, Dudley said they were both caused by tree limbs falling on wires, at 14 Lakeside Drive and 14 Ridge Road, respectively.

When it was time for citizen input, the tensions simmering over outages boiled over a bit. Tom Jones, one of seven Greenbelt Home, Inc. (GHI) residents out of an audience of nine, said that he has continuous "blinking" outages and power surges that have cost him $2,600 in damages to his refrigerator, heat pump and computer.  Jones said that Greenbelt has "Third World service at First World prices." 

Dudley said he would get Jones' address and check on the situation.

Chuck Hess said that Jones' remark was an insult to third world countries — he said he had spent time in a poor area of South Africa and found the service better than in Greenbelt. 

Hess also pointed out there were outages in areas of Greenbelt that were not heavily wooded — and that the outage problems might also be related to aging equipment, mismanagement, and poor communication with customers.

Mayor Davis suggested he take his complaints to the Maryland Public Service Commission which has been investigating Pepco.

The mayor said will be discussed at a later date when Pepco finishes its report on storm outages.