As everyone struggles to recover from Friday’s derecho storm, thousands of District residents and Pepco customers are left without power. Heck, even Mayor Vince Gray doesn’t have power. How are all you Hoyas coping in the post-storm madness?

Send us your pictures of the storm or anything related to it at blog@georgetownvoice.com. We’ll combine them all and put them together at the end of the week, giving you the opportunity to commiserate with your fellow Hoyas caught in the aftermath of the storm.

Photo by Kevin Joseph, fallen tree in Burleith

Pepco, Washington’s main power company and Georgetown’s electricity supplier, now ranks “near the bottom” in several surveys comparing power companies throughout the nation.

According to a Washington Post analysis, Pepco customers suffer through seventy percent more outages than those of other major companies. After finishing dead last in a 2008 study, Pepco simply stopped participating in the survey’s rankings.

As Georgetown and the D.C. area gear up for winter, Pepco’s reliability record proves troubling. During last year’s Snowmageddon, 98,000 Pepco customers lost power in an outage that took the company almost a week to resolve. In contrast, power company Dominion lost electricity to 105,000 customers, but responded by restoring power in just over a day.

Pepco’s regional president Thomas Graham told the Post that, “The number one commitment today at Pepco is to increase reliability,” the company continues to blame the real culprit behind their problems—trees.

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