Continuing Saga of the Planned Power Outage
This isn’t a picture of me but the photo by iamSherise on Unsplash gives you an idea of how I felt yesterday . . .
After all the furor yesterday, at the end of day I received this notice from the Public Works department at the city about the now infamous planned power outage. (The notice came after I had spoken to two different city offices, leaving messages but never actually talking to this person who ultimately responded.)
Read carefully. The key word is in the second line . . .
Hello Virginia,
I contacted the utility regarding the planned outage and they have informed me there was an error in the notifications. The duration of the outage will not be 24 hours. Instead there will be two 30 minute outages affecting residential customers and one 8 hour outage overnight that will impact only commercial customers. They will be sending corrective notifications to customers regarding the planned outage.
Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
Can you believe it?!
Perhaps you can. In our experience, utility companies do not always operate efficiently. (Joe and I have worked with utility companies a lot, on the East Coast and on the West Coast!)
In this case, I had contacted 3 different utility representatives earlier in the day and each of them had a different answer to my questions. I hung up totally dissatisfied. That’s when I switched gears and aimed my calls at the city to “raise the level of awareness” a bit more!
Later, the city Public Works person told me, “We have a direct connection with the utility because we work with them all the time on infrastructure projects. So I just called my contact there and she got it straightened out.”
Moral of story: “You gotta know who to call!”
Second moral: “If you don’t know who to call, keep calling until you get to the right person!”
Thank you for giving me the chance to unload about this power outage “error.” It truly created upset and even panic among some of our neighbors. Now we have the job of reassuring everyone while reminding them that an extended outage could still happen and they need to take steps now to be ready!
Please consider your own level of preparedness for an outage. According to my trusted sources, a power outage — local or extended, planned or unplanned — is the most common emergency that businesses face — and that means all of us.
Virginia
Your Emergency Plan Guide team
Day 19 of Summer Vacation: A time for some shorter and lighter Advisories as a welcome change-of-pace!