Pocono News Section

Power Company Opens Emergency Command Center

Power Company Opens Emergency Command Center - Monday, December 17, 2007 at 5:30PM EST

Reported by: Laurie Monteforte
Monday, Dec 17, 2007 @05:30pm EST
FRACKVILLE, SCHUYLKILL COUNTY - When your lights go out, their lights go on, and they stay on until every one of their customers has power.

WBRE visited the PPL Electric emergency command center in Frackville, Schuylkill County.

Workers arrived there at dawn Sunday. They worked until midnight, grabbed a few hours of sleep and came right back Monday morning.

"We need to be prepared to make sure our crews have the work, that they can get to the work and make the repairs that need to be made to get the power back on," said Central Regional Field Manager Ed Johnson.

The weekend storm left tens of thousands of PPL customers in the dark and in the cold. "A lot of people have electric heat and even those without electric heat need the electric to run their furnaces," said Johnson.

When a PPL customer loses power calls, the complaints go to a call center in Allentown. That information gets put into a computer. Then workers at the command center analyze the computer information to figure out what exactly caused the problem and then dispatchers send a crew to get your power back on.

Nancy Thompson is a dispatcher. She explained "I have to get to the crews. I have to give them a lot of information regarding the job. Sometimes I have to give them directions.

Thompson keeps in touch with 25 crews. Each crew works 16 hour shifts. Over the past two days Nancy racked up more than 15 hours of overtime. She says the extra money is nice and so is her mission. "I feel like I'm helping people as well," she said.

Johnson said, "If we don't have this room up and running it gets difficult to make sure the jobs are dispatched to the crews.

That command center serves all of Schuylkill County as well as parts of Northumberland and Columbia counties. Monday it also helped dispatch crews to Harrisburg - the hardest hit area in Pennsylvania.