Courtney Balcombe

News Editor

clb6264@psu.edu

For people who live in the Erie area and commute to Behrend’s campus, many have to deal with Penelec, the only electric company. More recently, Penelec has been shutting off the power at random times to do maintenance work in the Belle Valley area of Millcreek Township.

As a resident of the area, it’s a bit of a hassle during the day if you’re home, but as a college student on Zoom classes or even working on assignments the outages are more frustrating.

On Friday, September 24th, Penelec had given notice that the power would be out for a few hours starting at 10 a.m., which to me was fine because I would be on campus. Around 3 p.m. my mom was told the power was back on, but it was not actually back on until after 5 p.m.

While we had ended up going out for dinner it wasn’t too big of a deal and the power was back on while we were out. I was able to still keep the plans I had made with my friends, at least until without warning the power was shut off at 10:30 p.m.

At first, I didn’t care, but I did have to get up for work in the morning. However, even when I left for work at 5:30 a.m. the power was still not on until after 7 a.m. However, once Monday rolled around the power was shut off again without a warning to do more maintenance work. This time I was home working on school work that was saved through my Google Drive. 

With the idea of warnings from Penelec to know when they plan on working on maintenance and need to fix one thing, it would help those in the area know they will not have power at a certain time. It might not seem like a huge inconvenience, but when you’re in that flow of work and a  power outage stops it, sometimes it’s hard to get back into that flow.