ComEd and municipal leaders from across ComEd's service territory have announced a new collaboration to coordinate response and improve customer service during significant outage-related events by establishing Joint Operations Centers (JOCs) in communities throughout the utility's service territory.
Working with regional councils of government and approximately 400 municipalities in its service territory, ComEd will establish up to 17 region-specific JOCs, temporary office locations that will be set up within hours of a significant service disruption. Preselected staff will collaborate with ComEd and municipal emergency-response personnel to restore power to critical municipal facilities during major system events so that municipalities can get their communities up and running during these critical events. The JOCs will allow for close coordination during times when there are significant outages and also will help coordinate priority restoration efforts to a pre-established list of public health, life and safety facilities.
Public health and safety facilities have always been, and will remain, a priority for service restoration. However, priorities for individual municipalities can be amended as local conditions evolve, ensuring that a municipality's unique profile is taken into consideration. Annual joint trainings with municipal representatives and ComEd will ensure a strong and familiar working relationship between both the utility and local communities.
Triggered once a set number of customers are without service for more than three hours, JOCs will streamline communication and coordination among municipalities and between municipalities and ComEd during severe weather or natural disasters. JOCs will be the hub of communications during an Area Outage Emergency and will be staffed continuously by a ComEd representative and a municipal representative who will be in constant communication with each other and ComEd's emergency operations organization.
Within 60 days of completing an outage-restoration mission, ComEd and the municipality will conduct a complete evaluation and review. In addition, ComEd has planned several technology improvements to allow for quicker response times and improved customer service:
-
A smart phone app to report service interruptions and pay bills online
-
A newly acquired, US$1 million regional mobile command center that can be deployed to the worst-hit areas in a storm
-
A text-messaging system to report outages and receive service updates.
-
A revamp of the annual report summaries provided to municipalities.
For more information, visit www.comed.com.
