ComEd Works with Suburbs for Power Outage Plan

Remember last summer? The , homes flooding because sump pumps lost power, and food spoiling in refrigerators?

And when the power was going to ?

ComEd announced a plan Wednesday to better work with suburban governments when widespread outages occur.

ABC7 reported ComEd plans to set up 17 joint operations centers, or temporary offices, in order to better keep information flowing to municipalities in the event of storms and outages. 

The joint operations centers will be set up within hours of a storm knocking out power to significant numbers of residents, ComEd said in a statement. They will be triggered when more than 20 percent of customers in an area are without power for three hours or more, according to the Chicago Tribune. 

ComEd also plans to let customers report outages, and receive responses, via smartphone apps and texting. It has also developed a $1 million mobile command center, which it said can be deployed to hard-hit areas during outages.

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