Residents tell council Pepco and city failed to alert affected tenants in master-meter buildings

Residents and advisory neighborhood commissioners described repeated communications failures during the February and July outages and an Oct. morning outage that left Foggy Bottom residents without electricity again. "They asked for my phone number. I gave it. The Pepco person on the phone told me I was not a customer, so she could not give me any information at all," said Mike Silverstein, a long-term resident, describing how master-metered buildings were excluded from some automated notifications.

ANC officials said the problem is systemic: Pepco counts meters, not residents, which can understate the number of people affected in dense multifamily buildings. Commissioner Alex Marshall said Pepco provided strong communications to ANCs but not to the general public; commissioners pushed door-to-door outreach, flyers and property-manager distribution lists as immediate remedies. The committee asked Pepco to confirm call-center protocols to ensure non-account holders can reach live agents during outages.