Village President Blasts ComEd Over Power Outages

Village President Sandra Frum took ComEd to task for the length of time it took the company to restore power after a violent storm knocked out electricity to roughly one-third of Northbrook last week.

“We feel that the response by Commonwealth Edison was not appropriate, was not satisfactory,” she said at Tuesday night’s village board meeting. Power remained out in Northbrook for at least 2,000 customers after the storm, more than two full days after it went out. For some, power did not go back on until Saturday.

According to ComEd spokesperson Bennie Currie, 4,694 of the agency’s 15,229 customers in Northbrook were affected by the storm. The hardest-hit communities in ComEd’s coverage area were Elmhurst and Westchester, he said.    

“We had crews from outside the state, from neighboring utilities, including our own sister utility in Pennsylvania,” he said. “And at the very outset, because, of the magnitude of the storm, we made the point of letting the public know that this would be a multi-day event.”

Village President Criticizes ComEd Response Time, Communication

Frum, however, said that it was not only the duration of time that Northbrook customers were out of power (including the library, Sunset Foods and other downtown businesses), but also ComEd’s lack of communication or miscommunication that frustrated village officials.

“We were told by Thursday that 90 percent of the whole area would be up,” she said. “By Thursday morning, Friday night, Northbrook was at 57 percent. Northbrook had more outages than any of the surrounding communities at that point in time.”

Currie said that ComEd prioritizes restoring power critical to public safety locations, like hospitals and fire departments. Beyond that, he maintained, no community gets special treatment.

“We viewed Northbrook as we viewed every corner of our territory,” he said. “This was a pretty significant storm that had quite a bit of punishing damage in its aftermath, and that included two tornadoes, one in Downers Grove and the other in Mount Prospect.”

Although ComEd told Patch that power would be restored in 90 percent of ComEd’s service region by midnight the Thursday after the storm and the rest by midnight that Friday, approximately 100 customers were still without power on Saturday morning. 

Asked when, specifically, ComEd crews came to the village, Currie said he was not able to provide that information. ComEd VP of External Affairs Fidel Marquez, who answered questions for the company via Twitter on Friday, June 24, told Patch that crews first arrived in Northbrook on the Wednesday after the storm, initially to clear tree damage.  

That same Friday, a ComEd representative met with village officials and stayed at Village Hall throughout the day, going over where each individual outage was located and where the electric company was in the process of repairing it. 

Having someone from ComEd on site was helpful in getting information out to villagers, said Assistant to the Public Works Director Matt Morrison, and is something the utility company hasn’t done in the past.

“We were able to … get updates that much quicker, so we can let our residents know, get it posted on the website,” he explained. The village continued to update its website multiple times a day with the number of customers still without power.

Frum said that sitting down with the ComEd representative was eye opening, however.

“We actually went through their records device by device to be able to know which ones were out,” she said. “It’s amazing the depth of information that they had that they weren’t providing us.”

Frum also called into question the veracity of what information ComEd did provide.

“They said that there were 19 crews—crews are two or three people—assigned to Northbrook, but at any given time there were 9 crews and 11 were on the way,” she said. 

Currie said he was also unable to provide specific information on how many crews were in Northbrook at any given time.

Local Officials Hope State Politicians Will Confront ComEd

At Tuesday’s meeting, Frum said she had talked to State Sen. Susan Garrett and State Reps. Karen May and Daniel Biss, who have called for a meeting of nearby communities that remained without power for several days, including Glencoe and Northfield. Frum said she had also scheduled a meeting with ComEd to discuss the specific situation in Northbrook.

“We can put pressure on them, but ultimately it is the senators and representatives that can do that, because they’re the ones that work with them,” Frum said.

ComEd officials Monday—with Rep. May in the audience—to answer questions before council members.

Area-wide, more than 400,000 customers lost power and there were 11,000 lightening strikes, ComEd External Affairs Vice President Michael Guerra told the Highland Park City Council.

“We had 440 of our crews working 12-hour shifts and 160 crews under contract from other areas,” he said. 

External Affairs Manager Eric Duray explained that ComEd uses a triage system to restore power after a major storm.

“We restore our transformers and trunk lines first. Without that, the power doesn’t go anywhere,” Duray said. “Then we take care of the hospitals and public safety.” 

At least one community has taken matters with ComEd to the courts. In April 2008, Deerfield filed a class action lawsuit against ComEd in Lake County Circuit Court, alleging that individual citizens had suffered 82,347 outages since 2000, according to Deerfield’s website. 

In August, 2009, the case was dismissed because the judge thought the matter should be resolved by the Illinois Commerce Commission rather than the courts, according to the website.

Steve Sadin contributed reporting to this story.