A house fire in Southwest Philadelphia that sent five people to the hospital Wednesday and displaced several others from their homes has sparked accusations that PECO’s failure to maintain its infrastructure is endangering its customers’ lives.
A PECO electrical workers union, IBEW Local 614, said the fire resulted from a chain of events that involved a decayed, decades-old wooden cross arm on a utility pole. The union said it was the second such incident recently, following a power line fall in Delaware County last month that electrocuted two people and started a fire.
“What should have been a manageable incident became a disaster because of rotting equipment that should’ve been replaced decades ago,” union president Larry Anastasi said. “PECO remains more focused on raising electric rates and shutting off families’ utilities than they are on inspecting and repairing old infrastructure, and now two children are hurt and dozens of people are displaced from their homes.”
He noted that the accidents follow a recent steep rate increase for customers of the utility, which is owned by parent company Exelon. In January, electrical bills jumped 10%, to $149 a month, for the typical household, and they’re slated to increase another 1.8% next year.
“As PECO continues to raise rates, it is clear that very little of that money is going toward guaranteeing basic levels of safety,” Anastasi said. “Part of our job is to keep people safe, but PECO’s mismanagement is putting both workers and customers in danger.”
PECO blamed the incident on mylar or foil balloons coming in contact with an electric line, a problem that it says causes outages several dozen times a year in its service area. The company also said it has “robust inspection and maintenance activities” that follow industry standards.
“There is no indication that the condition of our equipment exacerbated the event,” a company spokesperson said. “The investigation into the incident is ongoing and the sequence of events is still being determined.”
Common problem, uncommon result
The utility and the union agree that the incident on 65th Street near Regent Street began with helium-filled mylar balloons, which have a metallic foil coating that conducts electricity and can cause short circuits or surges when the balloons float away and touch active power lines.
The surges can cause small explosions or pops that break wires, which last year resulted in 58 outages that affected more than 12,350 PECO customers, the company said.
Yesterday afternoon, however, the sudden breaking of the wire yanked apart the weakened wood beam on the pole, allowing the wire to fall onto a rowhome, Anastasi said. That electrified the building and its occupants, and sparked flames.
“Since the arms are 50 to 75 years old, that heavy jerk of spans of wire on the arm [makes it] snap, and then the wire runs the other direction,” he said. “If it was built with standard new construction stuff within the last couple of decades, that would have held right there.”
Neighbors say they heard a series of loud bangs immediately before the fire broke out, per NBC10. A corner store and four homes suffered fire and smoke damage, including one home where there were at least 10 people inside, including an infant and an older woman in a wheelchair, the station reported.
Over 80 firefighters, medics, chiefs and support personnel started arriving shortly after 1:30 p.m., Fire Department spokesperson Kathy Matheson said. It took about 45 minutes to control the fire.
Two children, two adults and one firefighter were taken to hospitals. The Fire Marshal’s office believes the fire was caused by arcing electrical wires, she said.
A pattern of downed wires
Wednesday’s incident is disturbingly similar to one on May 5 in Upper Chichester, Delaware County, Anastasi said. Two people suffered electrical shocks, including a pregnant woman, and their house started burning after it was hit by a downed power line, the Delco Times reported.
As in the Southwest Philly fire, when Local 614 workers arrived at the site to repair the power line, they found that a decayed cross arm had rotten and broken, the union said.
“This tragedy was completely preventable,” Anastasi said at the time. “Unlike other downed lines, this wasn’t caused by a storm or high wind. It was caused by PECO’s inability or unwillingness to maintain its infrastructure.”
The union president said his members see widespread maintenance lapses throughout PECO’s territory, especially in struggling areas like the Southwest Philly block where Wednesday’s fire occurred.
“You don’t see this in Radnor, by the way,” he said. “They talk a big game about underserved communities, but the truth is that the worst infrastructure is in the poorest neighborhoods. It’s intentional, because they don’t complain as loud as the people that are very affluent.”
“We have hundreds of photos of broken cross arms, stuff that is in service, that’s not being fixed. This isn’t unique,” he added. “The system is a ticking time bomb, basically. It’s, like, hanging on a thread.”
PECO disputes the union’s characterization of its maintenance efforts, telling the Delco Times it inspects “more than 1,900 electric circuits on a regular cycle to identify and correct any issues.” That includes visual inspection of “aerial electric systems” and use of infrared cameras to record variations in equipment temperatures.
Billions in new investments
Anastasi argues that PECO skimps on maintenance in order to fatten its bottom line and overpay its executives. “It should be the highest priority to provide safe and reliable service, and it’s not a priority for PECO at this time. They’re more concerned about giving bonuses to their executives,” he said.
The company argues it is actually spending heavily on infrastructure. It plans to invest more than $9.3 billion over the next five years to install new equipment and improvements, and to do maintenance of its electric and natural gas systems, the spokesperson said.
When PECO asked the state Public Utility Commission to approve this year’s electric and gas rate increases, the need to pay for infrastructure work was part of its argument for a big hike. It also cited the “return on investment” it’s allowed as a privately owned company.
In addition to buying new equipment, PECO executive Dick Webster said last year that the company needed to do maintenance work like trimming trees that threaten to damage power lines, and to pay for labor, contracting and materials expenses that had grown because of inflation and high interest rates.
A number of large power users, consumer advocates, and other groups had wanted PECO to lower its proposed increases, provide more help for low-income customers, or make other changes, and most of them agreed to a rate case settlement that saw PECO make some concessions.
The only group that declined to endorse the settlement was Anastasi’s union, Local 614 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents 1,430 PECO employees.
The union said at the time that PECO has struggled to hire enough skilled workers, and ensuring it has sufficient staff “is not an inexpensive endeavor.”
“If PECO is insufficiently funded to provide a competitive employment package, PECO will begin to face a reduction in its highly skilled workforce, all who work on critically important electric distribution systems,” IBEW said in a legal brief. “Thus, Local 614 submits that it is in the best interest of utility customers to pay more than rock-bottom prices for electric services.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
