It was a late night in June, and I had just stepped off the red-eye from Las Vegas. The 1 a.m. drive home could not have been more contrasting from where I had been just a few hours earlier.
As I approached US41 on Half Day Road, my foggy mind realized that the traffic lights were out. I could only make out a few flares illuminating makeshift stop signs. I continued home, crossing the commuter rail tracks on Old Elm moments before the last train from Chicago passed. The gates never went down, no crossing signal sounded.
As I entered Fort Sheridan, I fell backwards in time, driving along the 19th century buildings in darkness and silence. There was , no glare of street lights, just a stillness I had never experienced at home before.
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At that point, the electrical power in my neighborhood had been out for well over 24 hours. There was as to when it would come back.
What's normal for ComEd
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Over the last eight weeks, Highland Park officials and neighbors have struggled to define what "normal" really is for our
Even though all four places I've lived in Highland Park have been served by underground wiring, the occasional outage resulting from storms or high demand seems normal to me. But after the most recent outage, I asked my Facebook friends -- who live all over the U.S. and the world -- what normal electrical service means to them. Most of the respondents said they never suffer outages. If they do, the outages are brief, exceptional events.
Which means we have a problem here at home.
What exactly is that problem? ComEd won't say. At last week's , the company showed lots of pretty graphs and charts to represent averages, expectations, and response time, but never really said where the core problems lie.
It's true, Highland Park still has a lot of above-ground power infrastructure. It's true, many of those lines pass through dense foliage that isn't properly maintained. It's also true that a lot of our power grid is simply old.
But, as Councilman Jim Kirsch pointed out, ComEd isn't exactly hurting for profits -- parent company Exelon generated over $2 billion in profits in its most recent fiscal year. Some of that money should be reinvested in infrastructure improvements. Government officials have correctly begun applying pressure to ComEd to invest in the local grid, and I look forward to seeing the response from ComEd.
Who to blame
Not all the blame for the recent outage chaos falls on the electric company. Given the regional history, generators and backups should be the rule, not the exception. With the Edens Expressway coming to an end at US41 and Park Avenue West, that traffic signal should never be offline, period. If it is, city and state police should be out directing traffic along US41, not hoping drivers will do the right thing. I thought it was smart that Lake Forest closed off Old Elm Road heading to US41 while the signal was out, thereby avoiding potentially severe problems. I'm sure the village took a lot of grief from inconvenienced drivers.
Those are the same people who lined up in droves to beat up ComEd at the public hearings. Yes, is . But asking ComEd executives how they sleep at night (yes, a Highland Park resident asked that at the last city council meeting) is not solving anything. ComEd has 3.8 million customers. Right or wrong, the utility is going to set priorities to fix the biggest problems first. If you really depend on electricity, have a backup plan.
A 'reliable source of power'?
On my Facebook page, I asked my friends whether electricity was a right or an entitlement. My friend Dennis summed it up well:
"As a paying customer of a utility, you are definitely entitled to expect a reliable source of power."
We are not getting that here in Highland Park.
ComEd needs to work with governments and residents to devise and implement improvements. In turn, state and local government must improve real-time responses to safety and other issues, and do more than provide a forum for citizens to vent. I hope in the coming weeks we'll be reading more about plans than apologies, ideas than insults. From crisis should always come opportunity.
