\n\t\t\t\t\t\tOn April 29, 2025, a derecho with winds up to 90 mph caused extensive damage in eastern Allegheny County, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power.”We’ve never seen damage like that before. We’ve never had that many customers out of power,” Duquesne Light managing director of operations Russ Profaizer said Wednesday, speaking about the storm that happened one year ago.Duquesne Light has introduced new technology to enhance communication with customers during outages, including text messaging to prevent miscommunication.”With this new technology will allow us to do is have customers text us back to say, no, my power is not in fact restored,” Duquesne Light director of customer experience Jennifer Neiswonger said.A derecho is a long, sustained storm that produces winds exceeding 70 mph. Some residents were without power for a week following last year\u2019s storm. Duquesne Light has also made improvements to its ability to restore service quickly. “One of the biggest improvements we have made is the ability to scale up resources and get resources here quickly to ramp up for, whether it’s a planned event or an unplanned event, to make sure we can restore power as fast as possible,” Profaizer said. The company can now bring in up to 2,000 personnel and has implemented new technology to locate downed conductors more efficiently, reducing reliance on customer reports. The city of Pittsburgh is also preparing for future storms. “The forestry crews make sure that we have our backup equipment all ready, geared up, gassed up, everything ready to go. We typically have that as a resource anyway, but more so based on what happened last year,” said Lisa Ceoffe, city forester for Pittsburgh Public Works.Download the WTAE app to stay connected with breaking news. Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news in your inbox.\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\tPITTSBURGH \u2014 \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
On April 29, 2025, a derecho with winds up to 90 mph<\/a> caused extensive damage in eastern Allegheny County, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We’ve never seen damage like that before. We’ve never had that many customers out of power,” Duquesne Light managing director of operations Russ Profaizer said Wednesday, speaking about the storm that happened one year ago.<\/p>\n Duquesne Light has introduced new technology to enhance communication with customers during outages, including text messaging to prevent miscommunication.<\/p>\n “With this new technology will allow us to do is have customers text us back to say, no, my power is not in fact restored,” Duquesne Light director of customer experience Jennifer Neiswonger said.<\/p>\n A derecho is a long, sustained storm that produces winds exceeding 70 mph. Some residents were without power for a week following last year\u2019s storm. <\/p>\n Duquesne Light has also made improvements to its ability to restore service quickly. <\/p>\n “One of the biggest improvements we have made is the ability to scale up resources and get resources here quickly to ramp up for, whether it’s a planned event or an unplanned event, to make sure we can restore power as fast as possible,” Profaizer said. <\/p>\n The company can now bring in up to 2,000 personnel and has implemented new technology to locate downed conductors more efficiently, reducing reliance on customer reports. <\/p>\n The city of Pittsburgh is also preparing for future storms. <\/p>\n “The forestry crews make sure that we have our backup equipment all ready, geared up, gassed up, everything ready to go. We typically have that as a resource anyway, but more so based on what happened last year,” said Lisa Ceoffe, city forester for Pittsburgh Public Works.<\/p>\n Download the WTAE app<\/a> to stay connected with breaking news. Sign up for our email newsletters<\/a> to get breaking news in your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On April 29, 2025, a derecho with winds up to 90 mph caused extensive damage in eastern Allegheny…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[79,2924,38981,3985,62102,31322,7331,46168,80252,73,75,74,7172,2138,6740,46164,8875,78],"class_list":["post-179761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-city","tag-customer","tag-derecho","tag-duquesne-light","tag-extensive-damage","tag-improvement","tag-mph","tag-new-technology","tag-operation-russ-profaizer","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-power","tag-power-outages","tag-storm","tag-widespread-outage","tag-wind","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}