The village has been working non-stop with Com Ed to address the remaining residences without power and hopes to see them restored later today.
Bryan Place residents can look to regain power later today, once Com Ed has finished installing a new transformer, said Communications Director Doug Kozlowski, who with Village Manager Dave Fieldman, has been maintaining contact with Com Ed since Friday’s storms knocked out power to at least 1,000 Downers Grove residents.
Another 25 customers in the area of Belmont Road and Pershing Avenue are due to see power restored – if Com Ed can locate the household that has been running a generator.
The generator could be a serious safety concern once the electrical grid comes back online, because it could send unregulated voltage through the system, Kozlowski explained. Com Ed personnel are going door to door in an attempt to locate the generator, he said.
Also of concern to the village is the one or two customers who may not get power restored along with the rest of their neighborhood. Once it appears the area is back online, Com Ed considers the job accomplished.
Residents without power may not realize that they have to contact Com Ed again if they continue to have a problem, so the village has been helping with that, Kozlowski said. “We were working phones pretty late last night.”
As of last night, at least one resident of the Banchory Woods development was still without power, he said.
The village is attributing the outages to tree branches falling on wires. Public Works has been attending to the damages since the first storm was clearing the area and was preparing chippers and calling in workers by mid-afternoon on Friday.
While many areas have been cleared, the village continues to address damage to parkway trees, Kozlowski said. “Part of it is waiting to see what branches turns brown on trees,” he said.
As a reminder, the village doesn’t dispose of vegetation that falls on private property.
Photo credit: Greg
A good part of the problem is the aging electrical infrastructure in our neighborhood. The wires in back of our home are at least 50 years old. We barely flickered. All of the neighbors across the street were down for almost 3 days. The Mcmansions on Lee near Ogden were still down as of monday nite. These are all million dollar homes. If I spend a million on a home, I expect there to be reliable power. Walking the dog, I heard many generators on Cornell and Lee. I also saw many extensions cords going across the streets. One neighbor lost all the carpet in the basement when the sump pump had failed.
Another part of the problem is deregulation. The old regulated Commonwealth Edison was much more responsive. Outages never lasted more than an hour or two. Now, we get them for 6 to 11 hours. No more Mr. Nice Guy. In the old days, they worked 24/7 to get things back up. Now, they take their time. There is no profit in maintaining infrastructure, so they do it only as a last resort. ComEd is a monopoly. They can do what they want. Where else can we go for our power? As for us, it looks like we will have to invest in a backup generator. A 3 day outage in zero weather would be a disaster for us.
That must be one quiet generator. The couple that powered our neighborhood were pretty easy to hear.
Greg L,
I hate to disagree, but Com Ed in the days of regulation wasn’t all that much better. There was at time, when I was growing up, that the power would go out on a sunny day, and it hadn’t rained for several days beforehand. This was back in the late 1970s.
It turned out that a number of trees were rubbing against a main feeder. Com Ed would take care of one tree and declare the problem solved. A few weeks later, the power would go out, and they had to trim another tree while restoring power. This went on for 6 months.
Then there was 1992, when the storm came through that tore up Taste of Chicago. I lost power around 2:30 pm. It came back on around 5:30 pm. Then it went off around 6:15 pm. Customer Service claimed that they had to take us offline to get another area back on.
The power came back on at 9:30 pm, the next night. I never could get a straight answer as to how many customers couldn’t have their power restored without turning off my power.
Our power wasn’t down too long, maybe a couple hours. We were just starting the search for flashlights when it came back on. 63rd and Main was out so we got a non-stop stream of bypass traffic. One cop with a radar gun could have solved the village budget for the next decade.
This why some of these god-awful power line should be buried.