Cathy Schantz was among the tens of thousands of people whose homes lost electricity during storms amid last week’s heat wave.
The Richland resident, who lives in a housing plan near Bakerstown Road, said she lost power for more than three days — a total of 73½hours.
The next outage in the region might be handled differently because of upgrades Duquesne Light announced this week.
Schantz and her husband were able to use camping cooking equipment and their recreational vehicle’s battery-powered fridge to make meals during the outage. But communication issues with Duquesne Light, the area’s power company, made things frustrating.
She said they had trouble reporting the outage, and it took a while to find out the power might be out for several days.
“I reported the power outage, and I let my sister-in-law know that we were out of power,” she said. “When she called Duquesne Light, they said that they hadn’t had a report of power loss in your area yet. I said, ‘But I reported it.’ ”
Her power was restored June 20. But Schantz wishes communication from the company had been better.
“It just was very frustrating with the system not either getting through, or saying power hasn’t been restored,” she said.
Schantz isn’t alone in her frustration.
Lisa Callaghan of Plum, who also lost electricity to her home, said there was “zero communication or updates” after reporting the outage on the Duquesne Light website.
“I’m grateful for all the line workers, but I think we should’ve gotten some sort of updates from Duquesne Light,” she said.
Anastasia Mousseau of Trafford agreed. Her electricity was out for more than two days.
Now, upgrades to Duquesne Light’s outage management system promise improvements and a better response to outages.
The system features more real-time and personalized notifications for customers, a new outage map with more specific information and upgrades to the automated phone system to give more accurate time ranges for power restoration, crew status and outage causes.
Kristy Stone, vice president and chief customer officer at Duquesne Light, admitted the company’s response to the storms — and to about 90,000 customers who lost power — had room for improvement.
“This was an unprecedented storm for us. (It was) the biggest storm we’ve had in five years, and it wasn’t forecasted — it came up out of the blue for us,” Stone said. “What we didn’t do is meet our customers’ expectations on how to communicate with them about what was happening, when can you expect our service to be restored, can you give us a better estimated time of restoral.
“We tried, we had a valiant effort, but we didn’t meet expectations, and our customers deserve better than that.”
New upgrades
The upgraded outage management system will send Duquesne Light customers up to four alerts by text message and email, including when an outage is reported, when an outage is confirmed, when the estimated time of restoration is determined and when power has been restored. Customers also can choose to receive updates via voice message and can update their contact information online.
Duquesne Light said in a statement the system can send alerts when a known outage has been identified in the system, even if a customer does not report it.
“(It’s) tied directly back into the way we manage the grid, which is a significant improvement over what we’ve had in the past,” said Dan Farrah, vice president and chief information officer.
He emphasized customers should still report outages if they do not see their outage on the online map, which also has been made more specific and detailed through the system upgrade.
The new map includes more information on outage start dates and times, crew status, number of active outages, weather updates and warming and cooling centers, along with localized times of restoration for specific addresses and outage causes.
The upgrades, Farrah said, should make future storms easier to deal with.
“This is storm season for us,” Stone said. “Every week, we’re going to have potentially some storm activity. This is a critical time for us to deploy this technology.”
FirstEnergy’s side
West Penn Power, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Pennsylvania, had nearly 25,000 customers without power at 6 p.m. June 17, mostly in northern Allegheny County, southwest Butler County and Beaver County. West Penn Power specifically was hardest hit in Westmoreland County, where 6,200 customers lost service.
According to Todd Meyers, West Penn Power spokesperson, the company’s outage maps recently were upgraded and give customers access to outage updates for specific locations, with the number of affected customers, cause, crew status and estimated restoration time.
Location, county or municipality, text message alerts, updated summary reports and a weather radar overlay also are available through the map.
As for last week’s storm, Meyers thinks the company did a “very, very good job”
“That was a difficult restoration. It caused a lot of damage,” he said. To prepare, the company postponed all repairs or planned outages that were not critical.
“Every storm is different. Every storm is a learning opportunity,” he said. “We’re always doing things to refine the process of storm restoration.”
Julia Maruca is a TribLive reporter covering health and the Greensburg and Hempfield areas. She joined the Trib in 2022 after working at the Butler Eagle covering southwestern Butler County. She can be reached at jmaruca@triblive.com.
