City officials say more than 300 ComEd customers are without power in Evanston this morning as a result of damage caused by high winds overnight.
The largest outage affects 272 customers in the area bounded by Central Street, Central Park Avenue, Simpson Street and Ridgeway Avenue. A tree crew is on site and power is anticipated to be restored by mid-morning.
There are 82 customers out in the area bounded by Cleveland Street, Ridge Avenue, South Boulevard and Asbury Avenue. A tree crew is at that location too and power is anticipated to be resorted by mid-morning.
The other two locations are for single homes where the wire is down between the pole and house.
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Power out until at least late afternoon
Com Ed update now says that power will be restored by 3:30. So far they are 0 for 7 on their predictions for when the power will be back. I think they just throw darts at a clock face.
Also, I did not see any crews working in the area this morning (Com Ed claims they were on scene all night). I wonder what time they arrived to do the repair work and actually assessed the problem.
Power still out
ComEd has been telling me every two hours since 9 p.m. last night that power would be back in two hours, to my knowledge it is still out.
I called at 5:30 this morning to be told by the automated system it would be back at 7, I got a real perosn who repeated that and said a work crew was on site even though none was.
At 7:15, I called and was told 9 a.m., the crew was working.
At 9 I called enraged since I'd stayed home from work until then to be sure power was back and was told they had discovered they needed to get a crew to cut a tree…confirming no one was here earlier.
At that point they said 11. It's obvious ComEd's system is simply programmed to answer that power will be restored two hours from when a call comes in and it really has no clue who of its crews is where or working on what.
I ended up filling two coolers with a good portion of our frozen foods and bringing them to my office to save at least some of our food. Everything still there, in our refrigerator and a freezer in the basement, is likely lost now.
Com Ed is the worst
I guess they couldn't program their message to say, "We are sorry for your inconvenience but we will be dispatching a crew in about 12 hours to make this repair, when we won't have to pay them overtime. It won't take them long to fix it, it's just cheaper to string you along until then. It took us days (literally) to send a crew this summer when the power went off, at least we're sending them the next day this time.
Sorry, we don't really care about your ability to use our product because you are just our customer, not our shareholders. Oh by the way, could you call your elected official and let them know that ComEd needs more handouts and tax breaks. And we are going to raise your rates to ensure that we can continue to deliver the ComEd level of service you have come to expect."