The storm that ripped through Evanston at 70 mph Monday left 18,745 Evanston residents without power, city officials said.
It also gave ComEd a chance to implement changes Evanston officials suggested at a July 1 meeting on how the power company might respond more effectively to outages.
According to City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz, ComEd could have done better.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t really hear too much from those folks,” Bobkiewicz said Monday afternoon. “They’re not even giving a time frame at this point.”
Many Evanston residents who called ComEd were unable to get through to a representative, so city officials instructed residents to call the Evanston 3-1-1 center instead, Bobkiewicz said. The center received more than 1,000 calls.
By Monday night, ComEd estimated it would take three to four days to restore electricity to 90 percent of the roughly 8,000 accounts – more than half the 14,000 accounts in Evanston - that remained without power at that time, Evanston Utilities Director Dave Stoneback said. One account can serve multiple families or apartments.
ComEd had restored power to 685,000 customers by noon Wednesday, leaving 168,000 still electricity-free, ComEd representative Alicia Zatkowski said. The company had 700 crews working to fix the remaining outages.
Zatkowski said she was unsure how the July 1 meeting between Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl, ComEd President Anne Pramaggiore and Michael Guerra, ComEd vice president of external affairs, affected ComEd’s approach to dealing with Monday’s storm. The meeting was intended to address ComEd’s slow response to a storm the previous week, according to a news release from community info coordinator Eric Palmer. During the meeting, Pramaggiore pledged to improve communication with Evanston residents and inspect the city’s electrical infrastructure.
Stoneback said he spoke to some residents who were upset because the homes across the street had power, but their own homes did not. Many power lines in Evanston run through alleys, so this configuration of power loss is not surprising, Stoneback said.
The wide range of Monday’s storm added challenges for ComEd’s crews, Stoneback said. The company typically brings crews from Iowa to assist with large-scale Illinois power outages, but in this case, Iowa experienced outages, too. ComEd had to import crews from Kansas and Pennsylvania instead.
The combination of the outages and warm summer weather posed potential extra difficulties for residents out of power. The city ran cooling centers Tuesday and Wednesday at several locations, including the Lorraine H. Morton Civic Center, the Robert Crown Center and the main and north branch libraries, to assist people who lost access to air conditioning along with their electricity, according to a news release.
In addition to high temperatures, some Evanston senior citizens faced losing access to their cars because of the outages, Tisdahl said. A few seniors called the 3-1-1 center because they could not manually open their garage doors on their own, and Tisdahl urged residents to check with older neighbors to make sure they were not struggling.
