Clallam County Public Utility District commissioners will discuss Monday how to improve the communications system during future storms, Chairman Ted Simpson said Thursday.
The commissioners’ meeting is set for 1:30 p.m. at the district’s headquarters, 2431 E. U.S. Highway 101, east of Port Angeles.
“We’re going to talk about this because it didn’t work well,” Simpson said of the response during the snowstorms that began Saturday afternoon on the West End and started falling on the rest of the county by Sunday morning.
“People were calling me because the telephone lines were blocked. Then I finally got through at midnight Sunday,” he said.
If a recently repaired power line was knocked out again, the linemen didn’t know about it because customers couldn’t get through to tell dispatchers, Simpson said.
“The ones hit hardest were probably the one knocked out by the wind storms [during the week of Nov. 13]. I want to have a discussion of how to cover that,” he said.
Perhaps there could be the equivalent of a block watch captain who could contact the PUD about outages in a neighborhood or area, Simpson said.
“We have a recorded message that helps somewhat, but we need to do something different. We need to do something better,” he said.
Clallam PUD provides electricity in all areas of the county except the city of Port Angeles, which operates its own utility.
Wind storms that hit the North Olympic Peninsula in mid-November and this week snowstorms knocked out power to many of Clallam PUD’s 28,500 electricity customers throughout the county.
Some had no power for two to three days.
Customers’ frustrations were compounded when they could not get through via phone to the Clallam PUD office to report outages or get an update.
Callers on hold often would hear a recorded message saying they were 10th in line, then sixth in line, then back to 10th again — a problem attributed to overloaded telephone lines.
