Power company liability?

Factual Questions
1

It rained for 5 minutes here about 30 minutes ago.

As per the norm, we lost our electric power. This happens a lot
where I live.

Actually, IMO it happens a lot more than it should. We’ve lost
power the last two winters, causing us to have to move into a
hotel for 3 days both times. We also lost a refrigerator and
freezer full of food both times, and we’ve lost a couple of
refrigerator/freezer loads during the summer as well when the
power has gone out.

My wife and I were talking about this tonight because it doesn’t look
like power will be restored until tomorrow, and that sucks because
we just did our grocery shopping today. The fridge is once again full of
perishable items, and we are potentially looking at having to yet again
replace everything.

We were comparing out memories, and it turns out that over the past
5 years, we’ve had to replace the contents of our refrigerator 4 times
and we’ve had to stay in a hotel for at least 6 different nights.

This is getting expensive, not to mention damn inconvenient. Is there
any minimum standard that an electric company (or any public utility for
that matter, but my issue right now is with the electric company) is required
to meet?

Can people get reimbursed for the money spent on losses suffered as a
result of the power continually going out?

I understand that once in a blue moon, the power will go out. A car
may hit a pole, or something outside of the utility company’s control
cause outages.

But I am not talking about that. I am talking about a serious problem
with our power that has cost us (and our neighbors) thousands of dollars
over the years.

Our power goes out every time we get a wind storm. It can be out for 10 minutes or
an hour, but it almost always goes out. Same with a good rainstorm.
If we get lightning, forget it. The power is going out.

Usually it is a minor inconvenience and once it kicks back on, I forget
about it. But this is the last straw. If we have to replace everything we
just purchased, that is unacceptable.

So I ask the teeming millions. Is this just tough luck, or does my electric
company have a minimum level of service they have to provide?

Assuming there is no auto accidents or lightning hitting a transformer,
the power dying here happens way too often to be coincidental.
I don’t know anyone who has this problem at the level we seem to.
Apologies for any typos or bad formatting. I am typing this on a phone,
my eyes suck, and I can only see one line of text at a time.

2

I’m gonna hazard a guess and say no. Even if the power company did something that was their fault, or if the failure was due to negligent maintenance on their end : look. In most states, the power companies enjoy enormous protection from the state. Any lawsuit you filed would probably not be heard by the state courts. Furthermore, you’d be in a battle against very skilled attorneys, which means that you would need to pay for attorneys of similar skill and resources - but the entire value of your losses is only a few thousand bucks at most. You cannot break even.

Maybe if they had killed a member of your family you’d be able to collect, but not from a mere outage.

Invest in a generator.

3

I don’t have a clue about power company liability.

However, you might not be totally hosed. My renter’s insurance covers losses due to power failures, including replacing a fridge full of groceries. I took advantage of that in the aftermath of one of the hurricanes that blew past New England a few years back. IIRC, there was a requirement for at least 24 hours of lost power, there was a $400 limit for groceries, and I didn’t even have to provide any grocery receipts.

Obviously your renter’s or homeowner’s policy may differ, but it can’t hurt to skim through your policy or call your insurer.

4

The whole St. Louis metro area had an issue with this while I lived there. Any significant thunderstorms or ice storms would cause widespread outages lasting days.

Eventually enough hue and cry was raised through politicians and the media that the power company was put on the spot by the state utility regulator: “improve reliability or forget ever seeing a rate increase, inflation be damned.”

Their reply was that they’d been prohibited by many local municipalities from trimming trees away from the local service lines. With the result that in a city of 2 million folks there’d be hundred of line cuts after a big thunderstorm day. The rest of the story was they’d scrimped on tree trimming for years to save money & pocket the savings.

Anyhow, the state overrode all the cities’ contrary rules, the utility’s tree butchers went out and cut away half of tens of thousands of trees in the older neighborhoods. And miraculously, power reliability sky-rocketed.

Lots of folks were still pissed about the disfigured trees; they’d grown used to the idea that most trees should have a string of power lines running through the middle of the crown. But those folks were wrong.
As this relates to the OP: The solution, if there is one, is for your local politicians to put pressure on your utility regulator. If the problem is just the branch line feeding your neighborhood you’re probably screwed. Though you may get satisfaction by you and all your neighbors working your way up the customer service hierarchy & writing the CEO at the same time. Followed by starting a viral rant and getting the local news media involved. They might fix your branch line out of sheer embarrassment. But be prepared to lose a few (many?) trees along the way.

5

Obviously this is going to depend on the details of the electricity market regulation in the jurisdiction where you happen to live. Where I live (in Western Australia) the regulator imposes a compensation obligation if certain conditions are met (power outage lasts at least 12 hours, not attributable to equipment owned or controlled by you, not attributable to emergency action taken by police or fire services, etc). But you may not be so fortunate.

If there is a scheme, compensation will not necessarily be the full value of everything you happen to have in the fridge at the time. And, as others have pointed out, if you’re at risk of losing thousands of dollars from a power outage, investment in a backup generator and a few tins of diesel might be a more prudent course than reliance on whatever compensation scheme the regulator may have put in place.

6

They’re not going to take any kind of responsibility, if anything they’re going to tell you to make an insurance claim.

The only advice I can give you is to call your utility company each and every time it goes out, as soon as it goes out. Even though it’s just raining out and you know it’ll come back on 10 minutes later, they need to know about it. Sometimes those kinds of things are just caused by shorts due to water or wind kicking lines around and the recloser is just turning the power back on on it’s own after some set amount of time. I assume the power company gets some kind of notice about this, but I can tell you that if you complain about it enough time they’ll eventually do something about it.

When you call and get the voicemail thing, ask for a call back and when they do, each and every time, very nicely say 'Do you know why this keeps happening, it seems like we lose power at least X times a year?". When I did that, eventually they said ‘wow, you ARE losing power a lot, we’ll send someone out to look at that’. A few months later we got a call that they were putting an animal proof cage around one of the transformers/substations that fed our business. Helped quite a bit.

It may be that they just don’t realize that it’s happening that often and it’s time for them to send some guys up in a boom truck to trim some trees that are rubbing against the lines or clean some dirty insulators.

Again, I really doubt that the utility itself would cover anything, but you could look into your insurance (I’d check the deductible, per incidence, before I’d even call them) and decide if it’s worth making a claim and risking a rate hike. The next step, as others suggested is to see who they report to and see if they’re required, by law, to maintain a certain percentage of uptime.

Something else to keep in mind, if you keep your fridge door closed, most things will remain fairly cold for quite a while and even what doesn’t stay cold, really doesn’t need to be tossed out. If you lose power for, say, 24 hours, the shelf life of your yogurt or steak may have lost some time, but you don’t need to throw out the cheese or Smuckers Jelly. Most of the stuff in your freezer can probably just be refrozen and be perfectly edible, though I’d probably throw out ice cream. But, keep the doors closed, don’t even peek until the power comes back on. The first thing I’d do, at that point, is temp a few items and then make a decision, not just throw out all the contents as soon as the lights go out.

7

Power companies are pretty well protected against liability for damages caused by the electricity they produce or lack there of. There is often set recourses and fines paid to the state but the end consumer doesn’t directly benifit from this.

If losing power in your area is proving costly, write to your representatives and demand more oversight. Get a generator.

8

In Illinois, power companies are liable to consumers for damages if the outages:

  1. are due to the utility’s negligence; and
  2. affect more than 30,000 customers; and
  3. continue at least four hours; and
  4. result in the transmission of power of less than 50 percent.

Utilities are not responsible for

  1. Unpreventable damage due to weather events or conditions.
  2. Customer tampering.
  3. Unpreventable damage due to civil or international unrest or animals.
  4. Damage to utility equipment or other actions by a party other than the utility, its employees, agents, or contractors.

ComEd claim form.
Ameren claims process.

This applies only to Illinois. Contact your state utilities commission to see there is anything similar in your state.

9

Thanks for all the replies thus far. Great information!

This is a great idea, and one I’ve never even thought of. I may have coverage on my homeowner’s policy and don’t even know it, however if I do have coverage, I’ll have to weigh the potential recovery against the inevitable insurance premium hike. Still, a great idea, thanks!

Interestingly, the power company just did this last year. They replaced the poles, and they took down ANY trees which fell into their ROY. I had some trees 80-100 ft tall, and lost them all. Because of the continuous power outages, I had them remove all trees that could cause the power lines a problem, even if they were technically ok from the ROW POV.

MY backyard took a big visual hit, but I thought it was in the best interest of everyone, including us.

However, the loss of those trees has made my back yard a lot less enjoyable to look at, and that will remain this way for a number of years. And since my electric power reliability hasn’t improved one bit, I am more that annoyed that I did what I thought was the right thing by giving them permission to chop down some very nice, very old trees to remove any potential power outage issues with a fallen tree, or even a broken branch coming down on the lines.

I have begun a log to record every time the power goes out, even if it is a few minutes.
And I also agree thst in the meantime,a generator is a good idea.

Can anyone tell me about generator basics? If I bought one and installed it in my house, would I have to run any special (or new) power lines in my house, would I have to vent the funes properly, etc?
I know next to nothing about generators, but it could be a wise purchase, especially if it is something that we could take with us if we ever move. I assume it would have to be mounted in the home and properly ventilated, but I’d like to think that wouldn’t have to stay with the home if we wanted to keep it.

Time to start looking into local regularions.

10

This made me wonder what happens here in the UK:

These seem to me to be pretty trivial payouts but I guess that if you multiply them by 20,000 they would have a significant effect on the power company or the owner of the supply line.

All the home insurances I have ever had include compensation for loss of freezer and fridge contents. Whether its worth making a claim is another question.

11

You can spent a jillion dollars on a permanent backup generator, but unless you have very sensitive equipment in your home or somebody on dialysis lives with you, a portable generator is fine.

-RNATB, frequent hurricane victim

12

Start with your state Public Utilities Commission or equivalent.

13

Many/most times, lost food due to a power outage is covered by insurance. Having said that, I would NOT file a claim. First off, you have your normal deductible, which is probably $500 or $1,000. You would only get paid for anything in excess.

Second, insurance companies keep track of claims, and either raise rates or cancel policies for those who file claims. And when you shop for insurance, one of the first questions is “have you filed any claims within the past three years?”. You do not want to file claims unless there is a real loss greatly exceeding the deductible.

As for the electric company, calling and complaining is about all you can do. Even with bad weather events, losing power for days at a time is highly unusual.

I would look into a portable generator that supplies enough power for your fridge and freezer and at least have those running during outages, even if you have to move yourself out somewhere.

14

They make portable generators that propane and diesel. (some burn both, some burn just one or the other).

To me this seems like the way to do it. Propane stored in gas bottles doesn’t have a shelf life - I guess the tanks will leak out their gas eventually but it could take a decade or more.

Diesel fuel lasts longer the gas in storage, is a lot safer to pour (if you get some on your clothes you are not 1 spark from catching on fire), is safer to have fuel spills over the top of the generator.

The way I figure I’d set it up, I’d buy a duel fuel portable generator, and I would keep several bottles of propane around, stored outside, enough for a few hours of runtime. (you want to store the propane outside in case the bottles leak)

In the event of a longer term power outage, hopefully I could obtain more diesel from gas stations or my neighbor’s trucks. I also plan to install a solar array that has backup power capability (there’s a battery free backup circuit technology called “secure power supply” that certain inverter models offer as a feature)

15

Why would you have to replace everything? Don’t they have ice machines in your neck of the woods? Buy a couple of five or ten pound bags of ice, throw them in the fridge, don’t open the doors any more than necessary and you should be fine.

16

Again, YMMV. With my insurance, even though I have a $500 deductible for most losses there was no deductible for the groceries, and my rates did not increase. FWIW, in my calculation I considered that given how cheap renters’ insurance is, I’d break even on the groceries even if my rates were doubled for a few years.

I suppose a homeowner might be a little more reluctant to “use up” any goodwill that their insurer will extend, given that the insurance is primarily protecting a house that is far more valuable than my small pile of furniture, clothing, and electronics.

Really depends on the insurer and policy.

17

not sure but I do know that in the past when working in buildings that single phased the power company was billed for any motors that burned out.

18

Try filling several repurposed plastic jugs with water and put them in the bottom of the freezer. When the power goes out these blocks of ice help keep everything frozen, and you can take one or two to use in the fridge if necessary. Cheaper than a generator for outages of less than a couple of days.

19

A freezer should always be kept full. If you don’t have it full of food, then freeze jugs or cartons of water. A full freezer should be ok for two days, and maybe even a little longer, so long as you don’t open the door.

20

If you file a claim with your homeowners insurance you’ll have to satisfy your deductible first (250,500,1000). You may not want to file a claim if it’s only going to get you a little money after the deductible. It might not be worth having the claim on your record.