Still reeling from the physical aftermath of a crippling snowfall, Commonwealth Edison was hit broadside Wednesday by another type of storm–this one gusting strongly from elected officials.
Mayor Richard Daley roundly criticized the utility–though he stopped short of accusing it of bungling–and angry Chicago aldermen introduced three separate resolutions calling for City Council hearings on Edison’s response to the storm. State politicians got into the act too, calling for the Illinois Commerce Commission to investigate Edison’s reliability.
Edison officials said that repair crews were putting in a Herculean effort and were making progress, predicting that all but 5,000 Chicago area customers would have service restored by Thursday morning. And addressing one complaint from the politicians, they also asserted that the outages had nothing to do with how much is spent on infrastructure.
Officials in Northwest Indiana, meanwhile, were trying to sort out their own troubles. Even as snow fell in some areas, they were trying to dig out cars that had been stuck in snow, clogging expressways for days.
Back in Chicago, the storm had finally blown into the halls of government, where elected officials called for hearings and investigations–the same response they had to the last debilitating weather event, the heat wave of 1995.
At City Hall, after aldermen leveled a verbal fusillade at Edison, Daley charged that Edison has “not lived up to repairing and rebuilding the infrastructure–the transformers and all those other things that went down.”
The city now is in arbitration with the utility over what Daley administration officials contend is an inadequate level of spending, something they say violates the city’s franchise agreement with the utility.
John Costello, an Edison vice president, said that the company would be “happy” to appear before a City Council committee to answer questions.
“These outages were strictly a function of snow and ice adhering to our lines, and 40- to 60-mile-an-hour gusting winds,” he said.
Answering the question of how reliable Edison has been over the years is not easy.
By law, the company is required to file annual reports on power outages with the Illinois Commerce Commission. In the past, those reports have listed outages and their causes, but have not included other pertinent information such as the number of people affected and the duration of the service interruption.
Martin Cohen, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, recalled that the ad hoc committee drafting electricity deregulation legislation found the annual reports of little value last summer.
“When we tried to look into the reliability of Commonwealth Edison, it was impossible to tell anything,” said Cohen, who sat on the committee.
Frustrated, the committee wrote provisions into the bill that applied only to Edison, and not to the state’s other utilities, requiring the company to more completely report its outages. That law took effect Jan. 1.
“The object of the game was for the consumers to be able to assess reliability, along with the ICC,” said State Sen. William Mahar (R-Orland Park) who guided the drafting of the legislation.
The city’s 29-year franchise agreement with Edison went into effect in 1992, but the two sides were at odds over terms of the accord just a few years later. They went into arbitration in November of 1996 after power outages during the deadly heat wave the year before.
“They have departed from the investments they signed on to,” asserted Henry Henderson, the city’s environment commissioner. Edison promised to invest $1 billion in various system upgrades in the early years of the agreement, but has scaled that back by $400 million unilaterally, he said.
An arbitration hearing is scheduled for June.
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Also Wednesday, State Rep. Mike Boland (D-East Moline) and Pat Quinn, a candidate for lieutenant governor, petitioned the Illinois Commerce Commission to investigate Edison.
“To have two and three days where there’s over 100,000 people without power is just outrageous,” said Boland. “The No. 1 thing people want from a utility company is reliability.”
Ald. Bernard Stone (50th), sponsor of one of the City Council resolutions, complained that people without power who tried to call Edison were stymied.
“You couldn’t get through on the overloaded circuits and, if you did get through, all you could talk to was an answering machine,” Stone declared. “We franchise ComEd and they should be called to answer why you couldn’t reach them.
“In my opinion,” Stone told reporters, “they have violated the franchise agreement. . . . They have turned a deaf ear to the public.”
Another measure, this one sponsored by Ald. Michael Wojcik (30th), calls for company officials to explain how they would handle a future crisis.
Wojcik said he could not even get an estimate from Edison officials of when crews would secure a live and smoking power line that fell in an alley in his ward.
Edison defended its response. More than 300 staffers working 16-hour shifts have taken customer calls, and an automated answering system able to take 12,000 calls an hour handled over 500,000 in the first three days of the storm and its aftermath, Costello said.
“Our system takes calls faster than humans and get (outage reports) to people in the field in a much quicker time frame.”
While a peak of 375,000 customers reported outages at the height of the disruption, the total was down to 36,000 on Wednesday afternoon, including 13,000 in Chicago, 21,500 in the south suburbs and 1,500 in the north suburbs, Edison reported.
By Wednesday night, the total was down to 3,000 customers in Chicago and 5,000 in the south suburbs, according to Edison spokeswoman Laura Mueller.
In Indiana, as sun, salt and snowplows did their parts Wednesday to bring highways back to normal, officials were still trying to determine what caused one of the longest and most enduring traffic jams in recent history.
Indiana highways, specifically Interstate Highway 65 and the Borman Expressway, were transformed into overnight parking lots Monday and Tuesday after the storm forced highway officials to close the roads, stranding thousands of motorists. Many were trapped in their vehicles until Tuesday afternoon.
“We’re going to spend the next week trying to figure out exactly what happened and see if there is anything we could have done better,” said Carmen Wilson, Indiana State Department of Transportation district manager for much of the northwest portion of the state.
As road crews worked Wednesday to dig out vehicles that littered the highways, northwest Indiana was pounded with another storm. The Borman was open, but passage was slow as 18-wheelers snaked single-file along the still ice-packed road. Parts of Interstate 65 were closed off and on as wind whipped snow across the road, making for treacherous conditions.
The storm also delivered a beating to shoreline at the southeastern tip of Lake Michigan.
In Beverly Shores, Ind., waves toppled a sea wall and washed sand away from one home, causing it to collapse. Nearby, three other homes were threatened.
Up the shoreline, in New Buffalo, Mich., the storm washed the basement out from under one home.
“The house is real close to going over,” said Officer Mike Lenier of the New Buffalo Police.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Find outage information from Commonwealth Edison and other weather-related links on the Internet at chicago.tribune.com/go/snow