bodhisatta said:

Power is a government owned utility in those countries. They also artificially kept the price of electricity low for decades and stopped that a while back with a new president. So now they've got a third world grid in a second world country. Praise government!

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The only thing worse is private companies.

I once lost power for eight days

Quote:

In December, Maryland’s Public Service Commission levied a $1 million fine, its largest in recent memory, against Pepco for failing to keep up with tree-trimming and other preventive maintenance that could limit power disruptions due to storm damage.

In the aftermath of the June storm, unreturned calls or ones directed to automated answering services, along with conflicting reports about the timeline for power restoration, were at the heart of consumer complaints.

Hundreds of thousands of people in and around Washington fled or hunkered down in sweltering, darkened homes with no idea when the lights — and, more important, the air conditioning — might return.

Similar reports made public Monday by other utilities in Maryland show that Pepco customers were not alone in their misery. In the District and in Maryland, Pepco had a total of 483,639 customers without power at the peak of the outage. Baltimore Gas and Electric, which serves Baltimore and its suburbs, had 429,841 customers affected.


According to the reports, Pepco had all its customers back online by 4:30 a.m. on July 8, more than a week after the storm. BGE had full restoration at 2 p.m. that day. The average outage time for Pepco customers was about 26 hours; for BGE customers, it was 37.5 hours.

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