Last week, a Derecho of wind and thunderstorms ravaged the region with heavy rain and high winds gusting up to 80 mph. The severe storm brought down trees and tree limbs; damaged utility poles and electric equipment; and caused power outages across southeastern Pennsylvania.
At the height of the storm, more than 335,000 customers were impacted at one time. Crews worked around the clock, in a monumental effort to restore service to more than 563,000 customers impacted by the storm. Crews replaced hundreds of utility poles, transformers, and restrung hundreds of feet of cable and wires.
While still under the backdrop of a global pandemic, crews worked as quickly and safely as possible to restore the critical energy service our customers depend on to work from home, educate their children and take care of their families.
To accelerate our response efforts, PECO secured more than 3,000 additional field employees from across the country, including crews from our Exelon sister utilities BGE, ComEd, and PHI, as well as resources from as far away as Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Maine, Louisiana, Florida, and Canada. This is one of the largest contingencies of mutual assistance ever assembled at PECO and was critical in our response efforts based on the severity of the damage across the region. Mutual assistance between utilities allows resources – like line workers and materials – to respond where the need is greatest.
Thank you to our customers for their patience and understanding as we worked to restore service following this critical storm. For more information on PECO’s storm efforts, including safety tips, outage reporting, restoration process, and more, visit peco.com/storm.
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