Lawmaker Calls for Penalties for Prolonged Power Outages

A state lawmaker thinks power companies should have to pay up if they don’t do enough to address prolonged power outages that cost their customers.   Representative Tom Caltagirone (D-Berks) is proposing a bill that would make utilities compensate customers for unreasonably long power outages.   

Caltagirone   questions whether utilities are underfunding maintenance and repair. He says he’s been told maintenance and repair staffs have been substantially reduced.  He says he doesn’t want to penalize utilities that are doing the right thing.

Caltagirone’s Reading area neighborhood had been without power since the early season snowstorm hit on Saturday.  He says the lengthy outages in Pennsylvania have been happening back to back to back.

Caltagirone says a lot of businesses are hurting in this economic climate and being without power for a prolonged period hurts them even more.  He says workers are also being affected as are homeowners, schools, nursing homes and people on life-supporting medical devices.

Caltagirone says the utilities need to “fess up” as to what’s going on- are they not prepared, could they be better prepared? He feels a recent Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission special reliability meeting  on Hurricane Irene outages did not dig deep enough.

Caltagirone wants to know if electric utilities are cutting down overhanging limbs, reinforcing the couplets and the lines, and whether they could be using better technology.  But he says he understands it would be too expensive to bury all of the lines.

Caltagirone hopes his bill will help get some of these answers. He says he understands the situations are acts of nature, but he questions how much preventative maintenance is being done.

Caltagirone says the goal is not to put any utility out of business.  But he says they’re basically a monopoly in many areas and customers depend on them.