Politics & Government

PECO to Present Action Plan to Doylestown

Representatives from the electric company will discuss what's causing the repeated power outages and how to prevent them.

Representatives from PECO will come to Doylestown with a plan to better address the power outages that have plagued the borough since January.

Company representatives plan to present the information at a public works committee meeting on September 15, PECO spokeswoman Cathy Engel Menendez said Friday.

Doylestown Borough manager John Davis said PECO is taking the outages very seriously.

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"This has actually reached the desk of the CEO, and he has, for all intents and purposes, demanded a corrective action plan for downtown Doylestown on his desk by the middle of next week," Davis said Friday.

Engel Menendez reaffirmed PECO's commitment to finding out why downtown Doylestown has lost power so often and to fixing the issues.

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"It’s not just words. We get it. We get that our customers are inconvenienced whenever they are without power," she said.

"Our job and our goal is to keep the lights on all the time," Engel Menendez continued. "Obviously, some things happen that are beyond our control, but everyone here is taking the situation extremely seriously."

Downtown Doylestown has lost power six times since January.

The most recent outage, from Sunday into Monday, affected about 200 customers. The cause was traced to in front of the

On Monday, Engel Menendez said PECO believed the transformers got wet during the storms last weekend.

But Friday, she said the inspection of those transformers did not conclusively prove water as the cause of the malfunction.

"We still think moisture and water played a role, but when that wasn’t shown to be a slam dunk, they wanted to take the opportunity to dig a little deeper and broaden the investigation," she said.

An outage in January also was traced to underground equipment, that time near the

Four outages after that were traced to trees contacting overhead wires that feed the underground equipment, Engel Menendez said.

Angry Doylestown business and borough leaders demanded answers after the last series of outages in the winter. , and the revenue they lost when they were forced to close.

its infrastructure in Doylestown, including 16 manholes, about 13.5 miles of overhead wire and transformers.

Now, the company will broaden its investigation to include more equipment, Engel Menendez said Friday. But it also will examine how much energy the Doylestown area uses.

"With all the local growth in that area, we want to make sure we understand what the energy demand is on all different pieces of equipment and the whole system," she said.

Some in Doylestown have speculated that the age of the electrical equipment infrastructure has contributed to the outages.

But Engel Menendez said PECO focuses on whether equipment is working, not on how old it is.

"The issue isn’t age, the issue is performance," she said. "There's equipment of varying ages underground all over the area that is performing extremely well. I don’t think anyone would think it’s a great idea for PECO to run around ripping up every street in the service area to replace equipment that’s working."

PECO is taking other steps to reduce the frequency of power outages, Engel Menendez said, including replacing underground equipment as needed, trimming trees to keep power lines free from falling limbs, and installing equipment on overhead lines to contain an outage to the fewest number of customers possible.

Davis, meanwhile, said his conversation Friday with Ted Dorand, PECO's government liaison for the Bucks County area, was very positive. Both the borough and the company are on the same page, Davis said.

"We’re telling them, enough is enough. This has to change. This has to be corrected. And to their credit, they know it."


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