Saratoga News

PG&E RESPONSE TOO SLOW, SAYS SARATOGA MAYOR

Customers left in the dark about repairs

By Clarence Cromwell

Pacific Gas & Electric took too long to turn on power and to inform customers about repairs after the Dec. 11-12 storm here, Saratoga Mayor Paul Jacobs complained last week in a letter to the utility's president, Robert Glynn.

Some customers in Saratoga and other parts of Santa Clara County were still without power Thursday and did not know when it would be restored. PG&E spokesman Scott Blakey said the power would be back on by Saturday at the latest.

"You couldn't get away with this in the Midwest," Jacobs said in an interview. "People would freeze to death in the time it's taking them to get this service back up."

Jacobs said he plans to ask the California Public Utilities Commission to order PG&E to make improvements in its customer-service phone system and beef up repair crews.

However, the commission on Sept. 7 drew a similar conclusion after investigating the utility's efforts to restore service following a big storm that occurred in January.

Dianne Dienstein, a spokesperson for the commission, said it ordered PG&E to make the improvements by Dec. 31. "We asked them to improve the customer phone-answering system," she said. "The kinds of complaints we get indicate there are still problems, and we will follow through."

The commission investigated the utility's response to last January's storm and found that it was reasonable. It concluded, however, that workforce reductions, delayed maintenance and inadequate customer-service phone systems affected PG&E's response.

The commission ordered PG&E to reduce the time customers wait to speak to a representative to 20 seconds and to make sure callers get a busy signal only 3 percent of the time. It also directed the utility to use more radio announcements to inform customers of service outages, increase training for customer service representatives and provide more of them when needed.

PG&E increased the number of incoming lines to its customer-service call centers by 22 percent and added 240 employees, Dienstein said.

After the January 1995 storm, which cut off electricity to 2.7 million customers, PG&E restored power to 90 percent of the affected customers within 12 hours, according to Dienstein. About 6 percent of customers waited longer than 24 hours to regain power after that storm.

PG&E spokeman Blakey said the damage from last Monday's storm was more extensive than in January's storm and the Loma Prieta earthquake in October 1989.