Red River review: Electric service notifications and restoration process during outage.

There was an outage in my area on August 21, starting as early as 1:30 PM.

The FPL ticket, #408, showed that the ticket was created at 3:06 PM and 88 customers were affected. I was unaffected, as was half my neighborhood and restoration was expected by 6:45PM. At about 6:45 PM, my power went out, as did that of hale my street and the next 2 streets over. This amounts to between 50-100 single family homes.

I went on line to report the outage and found that my address had been lumped into ticket 408, which showed that on 61 customers we affected and was expected to be restored by 8:30 PM. I also turned on phone call-based notification on the FPL phone app. Shortly after 8:30 PM this was updated to 9:30 pm.

My lights and that of the second group of homes affected, came on at 9:26 PM. The originally affected group of home came online about 10 PM.

At 7 AM I was awakened by a robo-dialer call from FPL, there was no message and no person on the line. I hung up. A few minutes late I received another call from the same number. This time it was recording advising me that my power was restored.

Later that day I contact FPL customer support to report the issue. I explained to them the I was not asking for account help, I was calling to report issue with their notification and reporting systems.

The person was not very helpful.

Her responses ranged from telling me that I didn't understand how to setup call back preferences (There were no setting or details available in the app, it was a binary setting on/off.) to I'll make a note on your account.

Here are the core issues, I was attempting to get reported and relayed to FPL management, so that they could be addressed:

1) The FPL outage application seems to have some broken logic. When additional home were added to ticket 408, some how the number of affected customer went down instead of up all customer were receiving inaccurate reporting, when no homes in the area had yet to have power restored.

2) The FPL app allows customer to turn on/off phone call notification, but them makes calls as early as 7 AM (last I checked the FTC and FCC guidelines require that business calls occur between 8AM and 9 PM local time, unless customer requested otherwise). I did not request a call before 8 AM.

In addition to this I mentioned this but have no proof of this:

3) I believe that the second power outage, was intentional triggered by the repair personnel in order to facilitate restoration to the original customer. I understand that this may have been necessary to insure the safety of the workers. In such a case, this can be share in the ticket details or better yet the robo-dialer that called me at 7 am could be used contact the customer about to be affected to let them know they are about to experience a controlled power outage and provide them with the ticket details.

Attached you will find the initial FPL report showing 88 customers affected, posted by a neighbor, the initial restoration estimate posted about 3:15 PM and the updated report for the same ticket at 8:15 PM, after my family walked the area and confirmed 3 streets and 3 cul-de-sacs side-streets have no street or home lighting on. This area amounts to well over 100 homes.

Proposed systemic changes:

1) Fix the coding (or other issues) in the ticket reporting so that this reports accurate details about any outage.

2) FPL - set their robo-dialer notification system to comply with calling during common business only and/or provide the customer a setting to control when they may/may not be called, both in the app and on the website.

3) FPL - make effort to contact customers who are going to be included in a controlled power-down situation, prior to shutting down their grid/circuit.

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