Superstorm Sandy Remains PECO's Largest Outage Culprit

SOUTHEASTERN PENNSYLVANIA — Superstorm Sandy hit the region 10 years ago, causing untold damage to New Jersey and impacting Southeastern Pennsylvania to a lesser extent.

While New Jersey still deals with ramifications from the historic storm, residents in the five-county region had much less to handle but still weren't completely in the clear.

According to PECO, the storm led to the most outages in the utility company's history.

PECO told Patch a total of 842,950 outages were reported following the storm.

To this date, PECO has not seen such numerous outages, and Sandy is PECO's number one storm in terms of outages in company history.

In the wake of the storm, PECO began bolstering its grid infrastructure, and those efforts are ongoing.

"During the next five years, PECO is investing approximately $6 billion across its electric and natural gas systems to inspect equipment, complete targeted infrastructure enhancements and corrective maintenance, invest in new equipment, and perform vegetation management work," PECO representative Madison Davis said. "This investment includes PECO's Reliability & Resiliency Plan, which outlines the investment of $1.36 billion on targeted reliability-focused electric system infrastructure investments through 2025."

According to PECO, these investments will help prevent customer outages, modernize the electric grid, and reduce the impact of extreme weather on electric infrastructure.

Additionally, PECO is exploring technologies to help improve reliability for customers, including using drones to enable more efficient equipment inspections and faster damage assessments following storms, installing stronger poles and tree-resistant aerial cable, and installing specialized equipment called reclosers that can automatically restore service or isolate storm damage.

PECO currently has more than 3,300 reclosers installed system-wide. Since 2017, these reclosers have avoided approximately 5.5 million customer interruptions, according to the company.

Another initiative underway is "storm hardening," which aims to combat the effects of a changing climate and more frequent and severe storms.

Storm hardening includes making physical changes to ensure equipment is less susceptible to the impact of extreme weather conditions.

Other storm hardening tactics include implementing targeted enhancements in areas that have experienced repeated storm-related power outages; replacing poles, wires, and related aerial equipment to better withstand wind and ice; and retiring older substations and redesigning and upgrading the portions of the electric distribution system these facilities serve, which will create a more resilient system in these areas.

PECO is also planning to ensure it plans for 100 year floods.

The company is assessing historical floodplains as far back as 100 years to ensure new substations are built to withstand severe flooding and other weather events.