Electricity

When I read in The Sun ("Report from BGE details efforts to get storm crews," Aug. 1) that the average outage following the June derecho was 38 hours, I was doubly outraged. For the second time following a storm, the residents of Anton Farms Road in Baltimore County were without power for seven days. Baltimore Gas and Electric feels customers expect too much, getting impatient when electricity is out for 48 hours. Well, our community needs electricity for water and sewage, and seven days is well beyond BGE's average.

Say this for Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., they have a curious sense of timing. Six years ago, they sought a 72 percent rate increase at the same time that their parent company was seeking approval for a merger - and in the middle of a gubernatorial election. That didn't go so well. Now the company is seeking a rate increase - albeit a much more modest one - just after hundreds of thousands of its customers were without power, some of them for more than a week, raising the ire of residents and politicians alike.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. is seeking to raise distribution rates for electricity and natural gas, a move that would add about $11.80 a month to the median residential bill. The rate increase is needed to pay for updated infrastructure, utility officials said Friday. If the proposal is approved by the Public Service Commission, the median bill would rise each billing cycle by about $7.20 for electricity and $4.60 for natural gas. It's a particularly tricky time to seek a rate increase, as BGE faces consumer backlash and a regulatory probe stemming from its response to a powerful derecho storm last month.

Gov. Martin O'Malley set up a work group Wednesday to propose ways of improving the resiliency of the state's electrical grid in storms, seeking to avoid prolonged outages such as the ones experienced by Baltimore Gas and Electric and Pepco customers this month. O'Malley announced that he has directed his chief energy adviser, Abigail Hopper, to bring together state agencies to seek expert recommendations on improvements in the state's energy infrastructure. Among the issues the group has been asked to examine are the feasibility of underground power lines and how to pay for capital investments in the energy system.

Sylvester Paul "Butch" Bollinger, founder and CEO of Bollinger Energy Corp. who also was a volunteer at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, died Thursday of cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Canton resident was 68. The son of a roofing contractor and a homemaker, Mr. Bollinger was was one of 15 siblings. He was born in Baltimore and raised on Lake Avenue. After graduating from Loyola High School in 1962, he served in the Navy for four years. He served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex during the Cuban missile crisis and later in Iceland as a firefighter in an emergency crash crew.

Nothing makes a generator look more tempting than a days-long power outage in a 100-degree heat wave. Arnold Friedlander's Winn Electric Contracting in Timonium was so flooded with calls that staffers are still working their way through the backlog of requests for estimates and installations. Selling and setting up home-standby generators — the non-portable kind — is a regular but usually small slice of the company's work, which ranges from lighting to computer wiring. Then the damaging derechoblew through the region June 29, leaving about 675,000 in the Baltimore area without power, some for nine days.

Fortunately for us, we did not lose electricity during the freak storm. Yet I was saddened by the response of many of those who did lose electricity. Nobody and no company is prepared for all unexpected emergencies. The responses of those who lost electricity were understandable but off track. How many of them would have been willing to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. wearing protective gear in sweltering heat while handling live wires that could kill them in seconds? Had the customers called upon their spiritual resources and prayed and praised continually with grateful hearts, perhaps good things would have happened sooner.

After a week without electricity, Sara Waire felt little need to sugarcoat her answer when asked Friday afternoon how her family was holding up. "Today," the Stoneleigh resident said grimly, "has been pretty awful. " Her 4-year-old daughter, Mady, bounced on and off of a couch as she watched cartoons on a small generator-powered DVD player. Her 2-year-old son, Liam, crouched underneath the dining room table, pecking away at a game on his mother's iPhone. "It took them a couple of days to go crazy," Waire said as she warned Mady not to be rude.

As the Baltimore area braced for another day of 100-degree heat, state health officials added an elderly Baltimore County man to the death toll from a heat wave and storm, bringing the total number of fatalities to 12. County and state governments, meanwhile, stepped up aid to the 14,000 Baltimore-area households bearing the weather without power, many of them for a week. A blast of heat is expected Saturday, and more severe storms could arrive by Sunday, ahead of a cool-down expected Monday.

While most Harford County residents were unaffected by the June 29 storm that ripped across the region, and many of those who were affected have recovered, there were pockets of homes around the county still without power nearly a week later. In a number that fluctuates as other non-storm related outages have occurred, BGE reported on its web site at 3 p.m. Thursday that 698 of the company's 100,206 Harford County customers were without power. The web site also reported that 18,796 customers have had their power restored.