ComEd outage centers a good step

Weather had been the Chicago area’s friend for many weeks. But the weekend storms should serve as a warning — wind and rain can wreak havoc on the power grid as we have learned so many times before.

Indeed, the village of Buffalo Grove is still fighting ComEd over outage claims from storms last July. Earlier this month, Village President Jeffrey Braiman sent a letter to the Illinois Commerce Commission complaining that ComEd refused to compensate residents for outages that lasted several days. Some had multiple outages.

“For many of those customers affected in Buffalo Grove, the outages lasted for several days, substantially disrupting lives and causing the spoliation of perishable commodities. For some Buffalo Grove customers, a complete restoration of electrical service did not occur for nearly a week,” Braiman wrote.

Yes, outages are almost a guarantee at some point during the year somewhere in the Chicago area. Just a quick look Monday afternoon on ComEd’s website showed multiple areas with outages, some leaving as many as 3,000 customers without power.

We know ComEd can’t control the weather and some of the reasons outages occur. But it’s no wonder that suburban communities want greater satisfaction and better response from the electric company when outages do happen. That’s fair and reasonable, especially when the Illinois attorney general’s office recently concluded that ComEd failed to maintain and properly administer its own infrastructure and distribution system.

That’s why we’re very pleased by ComEd’s announcement last week that it was enhancing its response when widespread outages are reported in the suburbs.

Chief among the ideas is the creation of 17 “Joint Operations Centers” spread throughout the state to act as coordinated headquarters for ComEd’s emergency response teams and the 400 municipalities served by the utility, Daily Herald staff writer Jake Griffin reported last week.

The idea, said ComEd President and CEO Anne Pramaggiore, is to have “nerve centers for local utility activity during service interruptions.”

That sounds impressive — and needed. But Griffin reports that some town officials are concerned there aren’t enough of the new centers.

We are willing to give ComEd the benefit of the doubt on that because creation of the centers is a good idea. Community leaders in each region will work together to identify three different locations in each area for centers, which would be staffed around the clock with both ComEd and municipal officials until “priority facilities” such as hospitals and government centers have power restored.

But while the plan sounds good, it also seems a bit short on some key details, such as precisely where and how JOCs will operate in an emergency and how the specific staffing will be determined. We expect ComEd to work out these details, though, and do better this year when outages occur.