Changes to Come to Lansing BWL

Residents in Lansing affected by massive power outages related to last month's ice storm will be seeing some changes soon in policy.

An angry group of residents attended a special Board of Water and Light Commission meeting Tuesday wanting answers on why some remained out of power for two weeks and what can be done to make them whole.   While BWL head Peter Lark was again criticised for leaving town as the restoration effort was underway,  he refused again to render his resignation and likely will stay on in charge.  He did layout changes the the group that will hopefully ease some of the concerns of customers left in the dark.

Those changes include hiring more line workers and dispatchers immediately and tripling the number of line workers available in an emergency. An outage map will be going up online next week to let customers know where the outages are and where crews are working.  The proposal also includes an independent study of the breakdown in communications between the company and customers and development of a plan of action to make sure problems--at least of that magnitude--don't happen again.