July 10, 2012|By Scott Dance, The Baltimore Sun
"We appreciate the concerns expressed by the executives. Obviously we are always looking for ways to enhance our restoration efforts and look forward to working with them in a productive dialogue on behalf of our customers and their citizens," the statement said.
Regina Davis, a spokeswoman for the PSC, confirmed that commissioners had received the letter. The commission does not comment on pending matters. Nazarian said July 5 that a review of the utilities' storm response performance would begin three weeks after power was restored from the extensive outages, which occurred Sunday. Utilities, including Pepco and BGE, filed a request Monday to have that extended two weeks, to Aug. 10.
The local leaders' letter aimed to alert the PSC and utilities that they plan to be involved in discussions about lessons learned from the derecho storm and heat wave, Ulman said.
"We're the ones on the ground with our fire departments and police departments and opening up cooling shelters, doing the hard work to keep people safe during these emergencies," he said. "We wanted to make sure we're squarely at the table during these conversations about what we can do collectively to improve the situation in future disasters."
O'Malley sympathized with those who were without power for as much as a week, particularly nursing homes that were without power despite regulations requiring they have backup power generators. Those either were not in place or failed to operate in the recent outage, he said.
"Nothing has made people feel more un-empowered than being without power for seven hot days," he said.
Sun reporter Timothy B. Wheeler contributed to this article.
sdance@baltsun.com
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