To the Editor:
My wife and I have lived at 347 Walker Road, Great Falls, for 22 years. I understand that the semi-rural nature of the area, which includes significant tree cover, creates hazards to providing reliable electrical service that may not exist in more urban locations. However, I write because the frequency of storm-related outages has grown to the point where our service is no better than a third-world country, and I do not think meets the SCC regulatory requirement for reliability.
With virtually every thunderstorm that moves through the area, we can count on the lights beginning to flicker as soon as it starts raining and the wind starts blowing. We will typically get a power outage during the storm, most of which reset themselves within a few seconds or minutes. However, we continue to see more and more outages that are hours or days in duration; last night (July 8), the power went out when the storm started at 6:30 p.m. and was not restored until 2:30 a.m. We were regularly calling the Dominion outage line and checking the on-line tool for outage updates, and estimated restoration times were not provided through at least 1 a.m., when we went to bed.
I applaud Dominion Power for being diligent about attempting to restore power; however, I fault them for seeming to not be doing enough to protect or bury lines (especially major feeders) to avoid the outages in the first place. Over the past few years, we have lost thousands of dollars in spoiled food, hotel stays, and other added costs that resulted from these outages.
In Great Falls, most of the residents are on private wells, meaning that when power goes out we also lose our pumps that provide water for drinking, feeding animals, flushing toilets, etc. More and more residents spend more than $10,000 per home to install generators to deal with the unreliability. Should this really be required of residents, or shouldn’t Dominion Power instead be required to spend the money to improve reliability?
I would appreciate if the State Corporation Commission could specifically look into the service issues in Great Falls and require Dominion to make improvements to reduce these outages.
Michael J. Malesardi
Great Falls