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Consolidated Edison Inc. has long promoted itself to customers, investors and political leaders as one of the world's most dependable utility companies.
The company has had facts to back its assertion. The PA Consulting Group, a London management and technology consulting company, has twice named the company the most reliable utility in North America. All that good work has benefited Con Edison investors, who with the help of the company's healthy and always-growing dividend have earned an average annual return of nearly 12 percent the past 10 years.
But a series of missteps during this summer's power outages have some questioning just how reliable the company is in communicating with its customers in times of crisis.
The problems began in July when the company badly understated the number of customers in Queens and Westchester County who were left without power by a heat wave. The revelations of the incorrect figures inflamed the tensions that were building between the company and its customers, many of whom were already burned up by having to endure the scorching heat without power.
Cooler weather has not taken the heat off the company.
Mount Vernon City Council President Lyndon Williams complained during the Labor Day weekend that he was unable to get information from the company on when power would be restored.
And yesterday, Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano asked Gov. George Pataki to appoint investigators to look into Con Edison's equipment and emergency response procedures. Spano made the request as more than 14,000 utility customers in the county were forced to carry on for a fourth straight day without power due to the remnants of tropical storm Ernesto.
The problems, particularly the inaccurate outage counts, have put the company in the position of trying to protect the credibility and trust it spent years building, public relations experts said.
"Now it's all coming back to haunt Con Ed because everyone says 'Look at what happened two months ago. They're always going to drop the ball,' " said Bill Madden, president of Madden Communications and Marketing LLC in Chestnut Ridge. "It takes a long time to build a climate of trust and a short time to have it broken down."
Nobody says keeping millions of customers informed during a heat wave or in the aftermath of a storm is easy. Con Ed's media relations staff fields dozens of calls a day from television, radio, newspaper and other reporters who want the latest information.
The staff relies on engineers and control room experts for much of that information.
And the company says it constantly reviews its communications practices.
"There are always going to be lessons learned and there are always going to be better ways of doing things," said Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for the Manhattan-based company. "We give the information as we have it, when we know and as accurately as possible and we're going to continue to do that."
He said the inaccurate figures on customer outages were unintentional, a contention some observers have trouble buying. Misleading the public about the numbers would serve no purpose, he said.
He said that in Queens, where the network is underground, the company relies on customer phone calls to come up with estimates on outages. Not until the company conducted a street-by street survey did it realize the number was much higher than it first thought, he said.
Tim Massie, a former Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. spokesman in Poughkeepsie and now public affairs officer at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, said providing rapid-fire updates is important during an era when information travels as fast as a light and Con Ed has fallen down a bit in this area.
He noted that as of yesterday afternoon, the latest update on Ernesto damage on the Con Ed Web site was more than 24 hours old, though the company had already finished with a morning news conference at which officials offered storm damage information.
He said a company must sometimes do "extraordinary things" to keep customers informed during a crisis. He recalled one time during the early 1990s he took calls on a radio station from people who wanted information on power restoration after a snowstorm.
Massie said the company can help itself immensely by trying to showcase its hard-working employees in advertisements and press coverage. Men and women working long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions will generate more sympathy with the public than executives, he said.
Mike Paul, the president of MGP & Associates PR in Manhattan, agrees with that strategy. He said that if the company sought his advice he would suggest that Con Ed take reporters down into manholes to get a look at the complexity of the network and the efforts the company makes to keep it working.
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