The excuse is the "hurricane" is responsible. We live on the west shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Anne Arundel County. We lost power about 5:20 pm yesterday. Still without power and now running on the genie. Cable and phone/dsl went out shortly after.

Phone and DSL came back about 1:30 pm today. No cable or power yet and no estimate of restoration.

Now, we never had hurricane force winds. Rain in the 4-9 range, wind in the 30' (mph) only in gusts. (My neighbor thinks there was one a bit stronger.) But Tropical storm strength or less.

The power company that serves me states that since the beginning of the storm, there have been 471868 power outages reported, of which 171198 have been restored; 104893 out in by county, and 37139 restored. This power company does not provide power to any area actually hit by hurricane force winds.

IMO, I think this is a complete failure of preparation and maintenance on the part of the power company. Gale force winds and rain are not uncommon, and can happen in the many local thunderstorms we have each year. It seems that the vast majority of the outages are caused by tree limbs, and the occasional tree, falling on power lines. As part of the legal agreements and land easements the power company has, they have the right to come in and trim trees and tree limbs to avoid power interruptions. They don't do it. It seems more profitable to avoid preventative maintenance and ther to pay the costs to repair the outages, then claim "mother nature" was increasing their costs to justify a rate increase.

It's not as if our little area has had its first outage; this is one of many, and my neighbors and I have been complaining for years about the frequent outages. I walked around this morning and about 50% of the folks in our neighborhood had generators going. Several had extension cables running from one house to the neighbors. Kudos to people watching out for their neighbor, but the necessity for this is a shame.

Regulated utilities' profits are (usually) limited to a percentage of their costs. As a public company, they want to increase the amount of profit per share. If they reduce costs, their percentage profit remains the same, but the earnings per share go down because the dollar value of the total profit went down. Thus, there is an incentive to increase costs, which results in an increase in the dollar volume of the profit, thus increasing earnings (profit) per share.

Sorry for the rant, but after 12 years of this I'm tired of this power company's failure to provide power we can depend on.
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"Better is the enemy of good enough."