Maryland Utilities; Criminal Enterprises

It is no surprise to most people that the Eastern part of the country was wacked with a storm prior to the Independence Day holiday and that power was out for nearly a week for lots of folks. As temperatures hit triple digits the power companies worked feverishly (pun intended) to repair the problems and restore service.

So far, so good.

It is bad enough that people were without power but storms happen. What adds insult to injury is that the people who were out of power, who sweated their rears off, and who lost all their refrigerated goods will have to pay the power companies a surcharge to make up for THEIR losses.

Yep, in the People’s Republic of Maryland (led by Imperial Leader Martin O’Moron) the utility companies can charge people for lost revenue when there is an outage. What this means is that the companies will charge people for a service that was not provided. Customers who were inconvenienced have to pay the utility because it lost money.

Imagine if you ran a store and your supply trucks did not show up so you had nothing to sell. Now imagine the uproar that would occur if you forced your customers to pay you a surcharge because YOU could not provide a service. Imagine further, that this action was allowed under state law.

Most people should probably decide not to pay the surcharge but it might be a little hard to do because it will not be listed as a separate item. It will be folded into the delivery fee so there is no way to know how much you are being charged because the utilities could not provide a service.

I do not know if this affects me since I did not lose power and in any event I will likely never be able to figure out if I was charged because they can hide the fee.

Many people lost food during the outage. I recommend you contact the utilities to get reimbursed. If they tell you it is covered under your homeowner’s insurance point out to them that they were the reason and if you have to pay the surcharge they have to pay to replace the food that spoiled.

Only in a Communist State like Maryland could something like this be allowed.

UPDATE: I don’t know if this is the same charge but it looks like BGE does not want backlash. This from WBFF; BGE CUSTOMER ALERT: BGE customers who lost power for more than 24 hours last week will get a slight break on their bills next month. The company will waive the daily distribution charge for each day after the first 24 hours. Nearly 750,000 BGE customers lost power during the storm.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Big Dog

Gunline

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2 Responses to “Maryland Utilities; Criminal Enterprises”

  1. Blake says:

    I am sorry to hear this- this same thing happened here when Hurricane Ike came through in ’07- I was as prepared as I thought I needed to be, but this brings to mind Brown’s Corrolary to “If it can go wrong, it will”- “It will go twice as wrong as you could anticipate.”