Community Corner

PSE&G Hurricane Hearing Attracts Audience of Two -- Both JCP&L Customers

BPU says it may adopt "best practices" for utilities to follow to lessen customer inconvenience.

The following story was written by Tom Johnson and published by our partners at NJSpotlight.com.

At one point or another, more than 800,000 customers of Public Service Electric & Gas (PSE&G) were left without electricity in the wake of Hurricane Irene, slightly more than any of the other three utilities serving New Jersey.

Yet when the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) convened a public hearing into the outages, the first to be held in the franchise territory of the state's largest electric and gas utility, only two people showed up. One was the coordinator of the Office of Emergency Management in Lambertville, who was there to suggest ways to remedy storm problems affecting customers of Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L). The other was a customer of JCP&L who wanted to question its response to the emergency.

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That sort of crystallizes the problems facing New Jersey's second largest utility, which serves more than 1 million customers. Even when the agency sought to get comments from the public about what went right and what went wrong with the four electric utilities serving customers, it only heard from someone with issues about JCP&L.

Several dozen people showed up at the previous two hearings in JCP&L's territory to complain about the utility's response to the record storm—lack of communication, lack of coordination, and lack of resources to deal with power outages affecting 800,000 customers, some of whom were left without electricity for six days.

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Continue reading this story in NJ Spotlight.

NJ Spotlight is an issue-driven news website that provides critical insight to New Jersey’s communities and businesses. It is non-partisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.

 


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