A law on the books for more than a decade sounds like it might have helped people like Sheldon Langer, who last year lost $600 of groceries after five days without power. And the village of Glenview, which spent tens of thousands of dollars in overtime this summer for firefighters and police officers who baby-sat downed wires and helped open emergency cooling centers.
The law was intended to compensate victims by holding Commonwealth Edison financially accountable for extreme outages, defined as those that leave more than 30,000 customers without power for at least four hours and could have been prevented.
But 14 years after the law’s passage, ComEd has never had to pay out for such losses.
That’s despite the fact that a Tribune analysis shows that at least 30,000 customers in ComEd’s territory were without power for four hours or more on each of 26 days since 2003.
ComEd officials say the utility rejected 96 percent of all claims it received between 2007 and 2010, and that none of the claims it did pay qualified under the law’s requirements. Its total outlay averaged $250,000 annually.
The Illinois Commerce Commission, which regulates the state’s utilities, does not track or provide any oversight on claims filed with ComEd.
In the wake of several major outages over the summer, homeowners in towns like Highland Park, which were hard hit, were furious. A consortium of suburbs is pushing for more legislative action.
ComEd, which has met with residents at town hall meetings and with town officials, says the law wasn’t intended to reimburse customers for losses due to storm damage. Such a demand would bankrupt the company, officials maintain. ComEd also says the weather has been especially brutal in recent years.
At the heart of the issue are questions about the link between a storm and a power outage: Is it appropriate to blame “an act of God” for a major outage or should ComEd accept some responsibility for maintaining its equipment so that it doesn’t conk out when the wind whips up and the rain comes?
“Your average consumer understands that storms happen, and sometimes the power is going to go out,” said David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a watchdog group. “The question ultimately is: Is the company doing everything they can to respond quickly and preventing as much as possible?”
An Aug. 23, 2007, storm that left more than 630,000 customers without power illustrates how difficult it is for people to qualify for compensation under the law’s current interpretation.
While the ICC doesn’t track the individual claims, ComEd has continually asked the agency to waive liability on major storms. In this storm, ComEd said, the outages could not be aggregated because they started and stopped at different times and affected multiple pieces of equipment. ComEd broke the blackouts into 4,300 separate outages, none of which affected more than 30,000 customers.
At the same time, ComEd aggregated everything from lightning strikes to downed trees to prove the uncontrollable nature of the storm.
“Hurricane force winds peaked at 100 miles per hour. More than five thousand trees were felled, and thousands more were damaged. Over 80,000 lightning strikes, hourly rain of up to three inches, and flash flooding were recorded,” the company wrote.
Safety standards require that ComEd’s system only be able to withstand winds below 60 mph, the company argued.
Robyn Ziegler, spokeswoman for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office, calls such arguments, which ComEd has used repeatedly in asking for waivers, “ridiculous.”
“ComEd has interpreted the law in a way that results in the 30,000 threshold never kicking in,” she said.
Stronger standards
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After outages from this summer’s storms, a consortium of northwest suburbs, representing 1.3 million people in 41 municipalities and one township in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry counties, is calling for “strong legislative action to hold ComEd to higher reliability and outage response standards.”
“Critical public health and safety infrastructure, such as emergency operation management centers, police, fire and 911 operations, sewage pumping and treatment facilities, hospitals and other critical care facilities, too often remained without power for unacceptably long periods of time,” the group said in a paper released Friday. “During a time of crisis, when our constituents are depending on our local governments to provide the critical services they need to recover, we found our recovery operations hamstrung by ComEd’s inadequate storm recovery response.”
The group wants ComEd to be required to notify the victims of extended outages that the utility is asking the ICC to waive its liability. The notification, they say, would give the public an opportunity to object. Systematic weaknesses in ComEd’s system, the group said, could be prevented with more frequent tree-trimming.
The Tribune’s analysis of major outages shows that about 40 percent are tree-related and that more than 50 percent are attributable to weather, including lightning and wind. And ComEd’s system is especially vulnerable to both.
Rep. Karen May, D-Highland Park, who described her district as the “epicenter” of this summer’s storms, said the law dealing with outages needs to be strengthened. Her office received 500 calls and emails related to the outages. She was in touch with ComEd so much, she said, that several ComEd staffers are on her speed dial.
“I can’t continue to be a customer service representative for ComEd,” May said, adding that even if there is an extreme weather event, the utility should be able to get power restored within five days.
“We need to get some sort of enforcement. We need to get some teeth. I think it has to be at the ICC because they’re the watchdog on this.”
ComEd officials acknowledge that its system is built according to a “least-cost model.” In other words, it consists of poles strung with power lines. Burying the cables rather than stringing them along poles, which would make the lines less vulnerable to wind, lightning and disruption by trees, is 100 to 300 times more expensive, said Michael McMahan, vice president of smart grid and technology for ComEd, a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corp.
Some communities, he said, have opted to have residents pay for burying lines, using surcharges on their bills.
But the utility does have a budget for areas that repeatedly suffer storm outages, McMahan said, and integrates newer and better technology into those systems at its discretion.
One such recipient is the village of Glenview, a northern suburb of 44,692 known for its beautiful trees.
The village’s push for a solution to excessive outages occurred this summer. That’s when a senior housing facility lost power, and firefighters were called to help residents who were suffering because of lack of air conditioning and nonworking elevators. Village sanitary sewer pumps also were knocked out, and police and firefighters were called out to watch over live wires that blocked roadways for more than 24 hours.
Don Owen, Glenview’s deputy manager, said after more than 10 meetings with ComEd, the utility agreed to trim trees twice as often. ComEd also is installing a cable above the power lines to protect power lines from trees. ComEd, he said, has promised those improvements will reduce outages by 70 percent.
“I think it’s going to be a long process, but in my mind they have been attentive to our needs and they have been working to improve service,” Owen said.
The law aimed at holding ComEd responsible for damages to customers was passed in 1997 in the wake of widespread blackouts that trapped people in elevators and led to looting on Chicago’s West Side. Marty Cohen, then-executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, said the city of Chicago fought for the law, hoping it would reimburse consumers in the case of extreme outages.
“The intention was to hold the utility accountable for what can be avoided but not to hold the utility accountable for the weather,” said Ross Hemphill, ComEd’s vice president of regulatory policy and strategy. “One bad storm would put us out of business.”
The law’s reporting requirements also made it possible for the public to learn where and when an outage had occurred, the cause of the outage and what ComEd had done to fix problems.
“The idea behind this law was to make the company responsible and to prevent them from skimping on investment in the system,” Cohen said.
But the law also provided ComEd an out for power interruptions that were deemed “unpreventable.”
“The question becomes, what’s unpreventable? That adjective opens a whole door there to the commission’s judgment,” Cohen said.
Glenview’s Owen, for one, doesn’t see ComEd deserving a blanket waiver for storm-related outages, arguing that they aren’t all unpreventable.
“When major storms happen, there are going to be power outages. There’s no way around it. But my belief is that a majority of them could be prevented,” he said.
The claims process
A claim form accessible through ComEd’s website tells customers, “Damages resulting from storms, wind, ice, accidents beyond our control, vandalism, tree or wildlife contact, equipment failure, scheduled outages or normal operating procedures will not be reimbursed.”
“Basically, from what I got from it, they aren’t going to compensate you unless one of their power poles falls on you and kills you,” said Tiffany Widelski, 41, whose Wheaton home experienced seven power outages in one month this summer. She said the claim form scared her off from filing claims.
Towns whose police and firefighters work overtime because of outages can seek reimbursement under the law. But city managers and mayors interviewed for this story said they weren’t aware they could do so.
Consumers whose claims are denied by ComEd can file a complaint with the ICC, a process that triggers a court-like proceeding. The ICC said none has been filed.
“Who is going to go through a formal complaint proceeding just for $200 worth of groceries? Nobody is going to do that,” said Paul Neilan, a Chicago-based energy attorney.
Neilan called ComEd’s arguments for denying claims “insane.” “ComEd’s reading of the law renders it both meaningless and absurd,” he said.
The company said it voluntarily reimburses customers for days they are without power for reasons that are the company’s fault, adding credits to bills. In one high-profile case in 1999, after a series of outages darkened 100,000 homes and businesses in the city, the utility voluntarily agreed to reimburse consumers for spoiled food and other losses rather than endure a lengthy fight at the ICC. But fearing a precedent, ComEd’s then-CEO John Rowe (now CEO of Exelon) was careful to say the move was voluntary and that “the fundamental problem was not Commonwealth Edison’s fault.”
In August at a House Public Utilities Committee hearing in Highland Park to discuss outages, Anne Pramaggiore, ComEd’s president and chief operating officer, who is slated to become the company’s CEO in early 2012, said recent years have produced the worst storms in the company’s history.
ComEd typically has 10 reportable storms per year, impacting, on average, about 115,000 customers. So far in 2011, it had 13 reportable storms impacting, on average, more than 200,000 customers, ComEd said.
The company uses a color-coded storm reporting system — from “all clear” to green, yellow, red and black — and a 1 to 10 rating within each category. An average storm is “red 1 to 4.” July 11th’s storm was rated a “black 6,” the worst in ComEd’s history.
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After a summer in which powerful storms left some Chicago-area residents without lights or air conditioning for days at a time, ComEd is once again asking the ICC for a pass on compensating residents, saying that the outages were unpreventable.
At the same time, the company noted that it has invested billions of dollars in its transmission and distribution system over the last decade, reducing customer interruptions by 40 percent.
Pramaggiore said the company doesn’t expect the region to be battered the same next year.
“We’ve talked to weather experts, and no one has said to us that this is a pattern,” she said.
Meanwhile, ComEd has been trying to line up support at the state legislature to override Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto of the so-called smart grid bill, backed by the utility. The bill calls for consumers to pay for smart grid technology while loosening regulatory oversight, and for the utility to be exempt from liability for the nine worst storms in any given year.
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