Politics & Government
PECO Investigating Doylestown Power Outages
Borough leaders hope to have some answers by early April.
PECO officials have promised Doylestown Borough leaders an investigation into the causes of several power outages that plagued the borough this winter.
Borough manager John Davis met this week with PECO government liaison Ted Dorand, who has promised a report on the circumstances of the outages. The borough hopes to have some answers within about 30 days, Davis said Friday morning.
"They’re going to take a very thorough look at what happened to make sure it doesn’t happen again," Davis said. "Their response was great, and we’d like to give people some answers and restore faith in the system."
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PECO spokeswoman Liz Williamson said Friday that the investigation is already underway and is expected to last through the end of March.
"We are planning to report our findings in early April," Williamson said.
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Doylestown's faith in the electric system was severely tested by repeated power outages this winter.
At this point, it looks like each outage was an isolated incident, Davis said, and two were caused by bad weather.
On Feb. 2, when it affected overhead power lines. On Feb. 19, the power went out again when Street. As it fell, it pulled overhead wires down with it.
More worrisome is the on Jan. 31. The cause was traced to PECO equipment underground in front of County Theater, but even weeks later, it's still not clear exactly what happened, Davis said.
"That's the one we’re most concerned about because it doesn’t have an obvious cause," Davis said. "PECO is assuring me this is not a case where the equipment under the ground is aging – everything down there is 20 years old or less."
All three outages affected residents, but the downtown business district was especially hard hit. The ice storm and Ashland Street tree outages lasted only a few hours, but the Jan. 31 outage stretched into days, as PECO searched for the cause and tried to fix it.
The outages have , Davis acknowledged.
"We’re anxious to see what they come up with," he said of PECO's investigation. "If they were isolated instances, you’d just chalk it up to weather. But throw into the mix the underground problems, and then you’ve got a real recipe for disaster, and a recipe for people not having a lot of faith in the system."
Davis praised PECO for taking the issues seriously. The company's report is expected to be complete by the end of March.
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