What caused some of the lights to go out in Forest Hills last week

Another Pepco lineman on another day. (2013 photo)

by Marlene Berlin

Nothing gets the neighbors together like a good old-fashioned power outage.

A little after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, May 23rd, a group of neighbors, including myself, gathered on Albemarle Street between 30th and 32nd Streets to discuss the outage. We witnessed a Pepco workman checking a switch on top of a telephone pole. The workman related that he was checking the switches to locate the problem.

The area impacted included 30th Street from Brandywine to Albemarle and Albemarle from 30th to 32nd, at a minimum. Forest Hills Connection contacted Pepco for information. Tamara Jamerson responded:

“At 12:21 p.m. on May 23, a tree came down near a Pepco substation and damaged a pole causing impacts to roughly 315 residents in the Forest Hills neighborhood. Pepco performed switching and was quickly able to restore power to 235 customers by 2:10 p.m., with all customers impacted by this downed tree restored by 3:30 p.m. once permanent repairs were completed.”

We are still left wondering what delayed power restoration for the last 80 customers. But their power did come back a bit after 3 p.m.

Jamerson also wrote: “Last year, Pepco had record reliability and over the last five years Pepco has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to modernize the local electric distribution system and enhance reliability for customers.”

Pepco has indeed made a lot of progress. Power outages has been much less frequent in recent years. In addition to the investment in upgrading the power lines, Pepco has done a great deal of tree pruning, and when trees are planted under power lines, more attention is paid to their size.