ComEd has plan to alleviate Rolling Meadows outages

ComEd representatives returned to Rolling Meadows Tuesday night to outline plans for tree trimming, replacing underground cable and other work designed to alleviate outages.

Their visit was met with support, but also some skepticism.

The meeting was much quieter then ComEd’s last visit to the city in August, a 2-hour venting session for residents and city officials after a summer of outages.

ComEd will replace 5,700 feet of underground cable in Rolling Meadows and will focus on lines that have had problems, said James Dudek, external affairs manager for ComEd

This work will be completed by June before the bulk of the summer storm season, he said.

Dudek said they will try to lay the cable in the same spot it was before, and will let homeowners know in advance to minimize disturbing residents’ landscaping.

There are also about six miles of targeted tree trimming planned for Rolling Meadows, he said. Some of this work has already begun and will be done by the end of May.

Other improvements involve installing what Dudek called distribution automation, which allows real-time adjustments to be made, automatically rerouting power when problems occur on the system.

This automation is expected to serve approximately 4,200 Rolling Meadows customers by the end of 2012, Dudek said.

With it, Dudek said residents might experience a quick, five- to seven-second outage before power is restored, instead of waiting several hours for a ComEd worker to fix the fuse.

“It’s a matter of seconds, not hours,” he said.

A few residents still had doubts about ComEd’s plans and complained about customer service issues.

“In December we had some work done on our street and we got a telephone notification two hours before the event,” said resident Sue Allgire. “Some people work from home and rely on their power.

“I would just ask ComEd, if they are doing a preplanned event, perhaps two days would be better notice than two hours.”

Resident Carol Ohrn said she had four full days without power over the summer and was disappointed that there was never any reciprocation from ComEd.

“There’s never any letter, never a phone call,” Ohrn said.

City Manager Barry Krumstok said city officials meet with ComEd quarterly to discuss problem areas in the city, so he encouraged residents to let him know about outage issues.