Peco says it spent $15 million on storm

Just in time for a new snowstorm, Peco Energy Co. says it spent $15 million to restore service to 225,000 customers who lost power in last week's blizzard.

The five-day expense included overtime, materials and snow removal, said Michael Wood, a Peco spokesman.

In addition to 800 of its own employees, Peco employed 630 local contractors and workers from utilities as far away as Baltimore, Chicago, and Battle Creek, Mich.

Under the industry's mutual-assistance pact, Peco must pay the salaries and costs for feeding and lodging the out-of-town utility workers. It will recover the expenses in a future rate filing, in which the emergency-repair costs are averaged over several years.

Virtually every customer's service was restored by Saturday night, Wood said. Now, a new problem is emerging: outages caused by snow melt seeping into underground cables. "It's kind of a predictable pattern," he said.

Last week's storm was the seventh-worst the utility has suffered. A January 1994 ice storm knocked out 520,000 of Peco's 1.6 million customers. Hurricane Isabel in 2003 took out 517,000.

In New Jersey, Atlantic City Electric spokeswoman Sandra May said last night that service had been restored to all but 10 of the more than 100,000 customers who lost power. Public Service Electric & Gas Co. said service had been restored by Friday to 58,000 customers. Neither utility had a cost estimate.