When the extent of storm damage to the electrical system is severe and widespread throughout the area, company personnel cannot respond to every outage at once. Restoration activities are thus prioritized. In all situations, the safety of the public as well as those working to restore service is always the top priority. This commitment is universal throughout the electrical utility industry.
1. Public Safety Hazards
Our first priority is to quickly address public safety hazards, such as wires that are down across major highways, burning wires or equipment or building fires. While downed power lines are being handled, company personnel continue to assess the total damage to the electrical system's infrastructure and begin restoring service.
2. Public Health and Safety Facilities (Critical Customers)
Repair work that restores power to essential facilities that provide emergency services is a high priority. This includes hospitals, police, fire and emergency facilities, water and sanitary authorities, nursing homes and assisted living facilities, etc. If you believe your facility qualifies, please contact your Duquesne Light Company (DLC) Account Representative for more information.
Note: Customer generators being utilized to provide emergency power to their facility shall not have the ability to send any power back into the DLC system. DLC Electric Service Installation Rules state: “Customers shall not, under any circumstances, parallel a Customer-owned generator with the Company’s service without complying with the Company’s special requirements and completing the required Interconnection Agreement which will be provided by the Company. Such paralleling may result in hazards to Company and Customer personnel, equipment damage, and loss of service to the Customer and the Company’s system.”
3. Major Circuits
We continue rebuilding our system by next focusing on major circuits as we strive to restore power to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible.
4. Small Neighborhoods/Individual Homes
Once major circuits have been repaired, restoration efforts focus on smaller neighborhoods and groups of customers served by a single transformer. Finally, service to individual homes and businesses is restored as crews repair "service drops," which are the wires that bring electricity from the nearest pole to an individual building.
During outages, some customers may have power restored while their neighbors remain without service. This may occur because not all circuits are repaired at the same time and different circuits may serve different parts of the same neighborhood. Even houses on the same street might be served by different circuits or different transformers.
In major storms, some customers may remain without power longer because the electrical lines are temporarily inaccessible to work crews due to fallen trees, flooding, ice or other conditions that must be addressed before the electrical facilities can be safely repaired.
Just remember we’re constantly working. We will get to your outage no matter what.