Outages nothing new for Fairlane Drive

JOLIET -- Losing power for more than a day following a bad storm is annoying but somewhat understandable.

Losing it for no apparent reason is just plain aggravating.

But watching the lights come on in the house across the street while you're still in the dark, well, that takes the cake.

"It just gets ridiculous," said Dan Dickinson, a Joliet resident who has been without electricity four times since July 2005.

Dickinson and several of his neighbors on Fairlane Drive between Glenwood Avenue and Black Road have complained to the city about the number of power outages in their area.

The residents say they understand the occasional loss of electricity during storms like those that blew through the area this week.

It's the outages, which seem to occur for no reason, that are the problem. The outages last from several hours to more than a day.

They've lost power during light rains.

They've lost power during the middle of winter.

And they've lost power when there hasn't been any rain.

"It was a beautiful night and all of the power just went out," Dickinson said of a mid-summer outage.

Homeowners on Fairlane's west side are frustrated further because the homes on the street's east side seem to get their electricity back first.

"Right across from us, they get their power restored right away," said resident Moses Kwaben.

It's not like the homes are old: They were built in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And power lines in the neighborhood run underground.

The outages are more than a mere aggravation. Residents have had food go bad and have had basements or crawl spaces take on water because the backup battery on their sump pump doesn't outlast the outage. Some people have resorted to buying generators.

Homeowners said power hasn't always been unreliable.

"Actually, it's gotten worse in the last four years," resident Jim Woodard said.

So, why the power problems?

During most outages neighbors have seen power company employees working on a utility pole on Black Road.

Word around the block is that an underground cable went bad, and, as a result, workers can't switch the homes to a different, working electric grid while they repair the bad line.

This week, Councilman Mike Turk asked city staff to research the issue.

ComEd could not immediately offer a reason for the outages but said that the city did alert them to the concerns in the 500 and 700 blocks of Fairlane.

Company representatives are scheduling a meeting with the city regarding the issue, said Arlana Johnson, ComEd spokeswoman. She also noted that ComEd invested $3.5 million this summer to add capacity and improve reliability in Joliet and Shorewood.

View Andrea Hein's Web log at http://blogs.suburbanchicagonews.com/ahein/ or contact her at (815) 729-6018 or via e-mail at ahein@scn1.com.