Disasters happen, and when they do its important to band together as a team and respond.

I’m sure that the crews working to fix the current power outage in the Washington area that has cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of people – mostly in Montgomery County, Maryland – are working tirelessly, and making progress.  But what’s absolutely clear is that Pepco’s public communications effort has been terrible.

Twenty-five hours into the crisis, Pepco only published a news release outlining its progress or explaining the recovery process in any degree of detail in the last few hours. ¹Â  The last release was posted last night. ²Â  Pepco essentially went most of the business day immediately after the crisis without posting anything outlining what happened.  And its web site even went down this morning. ³

Obviously, the priority is for the Washington area to get back up safely.  But as the questions mount on the adequacy of its communications during the crisis,⁴, it’s important that Pepco not forget and make good use of the lessons learned.

1. http://www.pepco.com/welcome/news/releases/archives/2010/article.aspx?cid=1478. [↩]
2. http://www.pepco.com/welcome/news/releases/archives/2010/article.aspx?cid=1476. [↩]
3. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/dc/pepco-problems-force-website-d.html. [↩]
4. see http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/breaking/fenty-frustrated-with-pepco-storm-response-99260414.html. [↩]

Tags: Electricity, PEPCO (POM)

This entry was posted on July 26, 2010 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.