MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Later in the broadcast, navigating the maze of health care plans for federal workers, we get expert advice from Washington Consumers' Checkbook. But first, shining a light on what happens when the lights go out.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIPEPCO is the target of a new Washington Post investigation. An analysis of data by the newspaper has found that PEPCO has a hard time keeping the power on and that equipment failures are usually to blame. PEPCO officials say they've got a five-year plan in place to improve reliability. But what does this all mean for customers now as cold weather sets in? Joining us from the studios of The Washington Post is Joe Stephens. He's a reporter from The Washington Post. Joe Stephens, thank you so much for joining us.

MR. JOE STEPHENSThanks for having me.

NNAMDIJoe, PEPCO says that falling tree limbs are often to blame for outages. You found out that argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Explain what the data says in layman's terms.

STEPHENSWell, what we found is when -- this has been discussed repeatedly in the Washington area, that falling tree limbs, the power going out repeatedly. The trees always come up. And PEPCO seems always brings them up first as the culprit and says, we have so many trees, it's very difficult to maintain the lines. And people love these beautiful canopies and they don't want us fooling with them. But what we found is when you really dig into the numbers fully, last year, 44 percent of the outages, the biggest category by far, were caused not by trees, but were caused by equipment failure. So PEPCO's own equipment.

STEPHENSAnd the fact is when you have a huge storm like the snowmaggedon storms back in February or this big storm we had breeze through in July, yes, during those storms, often most of the outages are caused by falling tree limbs. But we've -- what we've found is that sort of obscures a much greater problem and that's day-to-day reliability. And the outages day in and day out are much more pervasive than the outages during storms. And the -- what we found is we're just at the bottom of the scale in many surveys when it comes to reliability. We looked at various metrics for the frequency of outages and the duration of outages.

STEPHENSAnd we looked at outages, what are known in the industry as sustained outages, which are five minutes or more, not your momentary blips. And what we found is we just don't look good, customers of PEPCO. One of the surveys we looked at nationwide, a big city power company showed that PEPCO customers were 70 percent more likely to have an outage in a given year than the average utility in the survey. They also compared...

NNAMDIBig cities are one thing, but how about big cities or other cities that have a similar amount of tree cover?

STEPHENSWell, one of the most interesting things we found is -- a key part of this discussion up to this point has been a chart that PEPCO put together. And that chart shows that Washington has the fourth densest tree canopy in the nation. And this has actually been submitted to regulators repeatedly, both in Maryland and in D.C., showing that there's only three other cities that have a bigger tree canopy. And so what can you do? Well, in fact, when we talked to the experts who were cited as the source of that information, they said they don't believe that's true at all. They believe Washington's canopy is just about average for big cities.

STEPHENSThen we went to the three cities, which on PEPCO's chart have denser tree canopies and we found that their electrical systems are more reliable. They have fewer outages. And when the lights go out, they get the power back on quicker. So that seems to be a bit of a red herring.

NNAMDIWe had PEPCO's President Thomas Graham on The Politics Hour this past Friday, and I'm sure many of our listeners heard that. If you'd like to join this conversation, you can call us at 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org, join the conversation there. How would you rate the performance of PEPCO and our other utility providers here in our region? 800-433-8850. We've -- we're talking with Joe Stephens of The Washington Post who has been conducting a investigation of this issue. Joe, when did PEPCO's reliability start to slip and why?

STEPHENSWell, my colleague, Mary Pat Flaherty, and I went back 10 years and collected data of both for PECO and regional utilities and utilities around the country. And what we found is before 2005, PEPCO's reliability was around average. And then there was a dramatic decrease in reliability after that. Both the duration and the frequency of the outages went up and it's never gotten back to where it was before that.

NNAMDIWe talked on Friday, as I mentioned, with PEPCO President Thomas Graham. Here's what he had to say about reliability.

MR. THOMAS GRAHAMWe've been very busy over the last few months. We implemented a six-point plan, five-year, $256.5 million reliability enhancement plan for our Maryland customers. And in the District of Columbia, we committed 318 million for reliability enhancement measures. There are several areas. One happens to be vegetation management, so we're doing a lot of tree trimming. I've been to Montgomery County a number of times and there hasn't been a time that I've been there that I haven't seen or heard a tree trimming crew hard at work. So that's part of it. At some point, we're now gonna look at select undergrounding. We're gonna put in distribution automation devices. There are some feeders that we have particular trouble with. We're providing them a great deal of attention right now. And we're doing a lot of replacement of underground cable.

NNAMDIThat's PEPCO's president, Thomas Graham, on The Politics Hour this past Friday. Joe Stephens, PEPCO officials told you they've launched a five-year plan to improve reliability. Tell us about that. How much will it cost and who will be paying for it?

STEPHENSWell, this plan, they say that in the district in Maryland, they're gonna spend about $190 million in addition to what they normally would spend to improve reliability over the next five years. But that's mixed news for customers because PEPCO called a press conference today in response to our story, and one of the things they said is customers should expect to pay about a dollar more a month to pay for these improvements that they're kind of beholden to what customers want to pay. They've tried to keep down costs, and this is going to cause an increase in costs. They have to go through regulators, both in Maryland and D.C., to get approval for this. But if their plan goes into effect, beginning about 18 months from now, that customers would start paying a significant increase to get more reliable service.

NNAMDIJoe, is the data that you relied on for this report widely available? How did you accessed and analyzed this information?

STEPHENSThe information is available, but it's very hard to collect. It's scattered. We received information from regulators. In most states, there's a public service commission or something of that sort which requires some disclosure. Some companies give up information. Companies involved -- are involved in various benchmarking surveys around the country, where they decide that they will show their numbers to other companies so they can compare, but no one really likes to talk about this much because it could be embarrassing. As a matter fact, we found that in the one -- there was one survey in 2008 where PEPCO on three measures of reliability was the very bottom company in the survey. The next year, PEPCO decided not to participate in that survey anymore.

NNAMDII wonder why. Joe Stephens is a reporter with The Washington Post. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.

STEPHENSThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDIWe're gonna take a short break. When we come back, it's open season for federal employees looking to change their health care plans. Join us and you can find out more about health care plans that are available in general for everyone. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.