Gas shut off without notification
by
Smyrna Utilities is doing a good thing.
It is systematically upgrading its meter reading technology a few houses at a time.
The city says it is installing wireless transmitting devices that will allow meter readers to get quick and accurate readings at a customer’s home.
Officials tell me there are 9,000 customers and upgrading the entire system will take years, at the pace the agency is currently moving.
Because economic times are tight, the city is doing the upgrades using existing manpower. Because the city is using its own people, the upgrades only happen when crews are not busy.
This is why gas crews can’t let consumers know in advance when they’re coming to your house.
Utilities Director Jack Reinhard admits this to me in the lobby of City Hall.
“We do it as we can. We have a limited number of people and we do it with our personnel. So
It is when they have time outside their normal work calls. As they have time, they keep a list and they know, say over time that over weeks, we’ll be in this area.”
To complete the upgrade, the gas man needs to relight the pilot light. They can only relight the pilot light when a resident is home.
“It requires us to cut the gas off,” Reinhard tells me, his voice echoing in the busy city hall foyer. “We do that to be safe, we have to have a person home to turn it back on. When we do this, if no one is home, we leave a door hanger to let them know we did work on the meter and they need to call us and schedule for us to come back.”
Nolensville resident and Smyrna Utility customer Jamie Camp says this policy is all Messed Up.
“I think there should be notification,” she says. “If they are going to turn off your gas and they know it, they could let the consumer know.”
From her Spartan office in Nashville, Camp holds the door hanger before her.
The simple paperwork says: Your gas man has been here.
She reads from the slightly weathered placard.
“Your gas has been cut off.”
“Did you know it was going to be cut off?” I ask.
“No,” she says with a sense of angst.
She tells me that she had just paid the bill, and that was not the problem.
“There were numerous other notices on mailboxes,” she says.
It all starts when Camp gets a call from her husband.
He doesn’t usually go home for lunch, she says. When he got there, this was hanging from the mailbox.
“He called [the gas company]. They said they turned it off to replace a piece of equipment and we needed to have some one there to turn [the gas] back on.”
According to Camp, the gas company representative indicated it was lunch time and coming to the house to relight the pilot at that moment was not possible.
Camp is perturbed as she recounts the next series of events.
It starts with her husband asking her to deal with this, and her calling the gas company.
“I asked, was there any notification? Did we miss something in the mail? They said, ‘No, no notification was sent out.’ We were told we had to be there for them to turn it back on, it could not be after hours and not at our convenience and if it was after hours, they would charge us a fee.”
Camp is a working woman. She’s a wife and a mother and says her family normally arrives home at 7 p.m. or 8 p.m.
She says had her husband not been home, her family would have gone home only to find a house with no gas, no hot showers and not heat; a major inconvenience to be sure.
“We were lucky,” she says from her desk.
She is holding the placard before her.
I zoom through the circular opening in the card and see her eyes gazing at the words before her.
“We went home and found this. Normally we arrive at 8 p.m. that night to find this with kids who need showers and we would have to turn it on and pay a fee. I saw several of these out on mailboxes. We have many people in our community where both adults work. They would not have the opportunity to be home when this happens. It is messed up,” she says with emphasis.
Camp asks the customer service people if they can come to her home to relight the pilot on her schedule, around 7 p.m.
She it told not without incurring an afterhours charge.
Already upset and not wanting to suffer a deeper blow to her checkbook, Camp decides her best option is leave work, travel all the way to Nolensville and wait on the gas man to finish lunch and then relight her pilot.
Is she pissed? You bet!
“I didn’t understand. It had to be done. It had something to do with the meters, but I think we could have been told in advance to make plans for it, so we didn’t have to come home to a surprise and no gas,” she said.
I go to the city hall and talk at length with Mr. Reinhard and the city’s finance director, Mark Tucker.
They don’t know I’m coming and I’m pretty sure they are put off by the questions I am posing, but that’s the job.
It’s now that I learn that the gas company is maximizing efforts to upgrade technology using existing manpower.
“There is limited manpower and we are trying to save dollars by not contracting this out,” Tucker tells me. “When they have down time or there are no emergency calls or other service calls they have to make, they upgrade.”
It seems a little unusual to me. Not know when you are going to upgrade your system, but after listening to their logic, I can buy into the premise.
The idea is simple: maximize results over time without a huge capital outlay.
So what about charging after hour fees?
Camp is emphatic that when she asked the customer service rep about after hour fees, she was told it would cost her extra.
“There should not be a charge,” the utilities director says. “Particularly when it is something we have done on routine basis. We would not charge the customer for this.”
This is where the city could send out a memo and make sure that everyone is on the same page.
I suggest to the city leaders that its plan needs to be uniformly addressed with all city employees so when the next “Jamie Camp” calls, they will know the policy and how to relay that to a customer.
Camp insists she only went home and blew off the better part of her work day because she was told she would have to pay an extra fee if she didn’t.
Tucker tells me that after hours fees run about $20.
When I tell Camp that, she rolls her eyes.
“If I had known that,” she says with a hint of frustration, “I’d have just paid it.”
Perhaps Camp didn’t ask. Maybe they didn’t tell.
Either way, the city official tells me there is no after hour charge for something like this.
So why are your people telling your customers there is?
“They shouldn’t be,” the city officials admit.
What do you think?
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It is a communication problem that the Gas utlity has. Perhaps calling their customers as they upgrade might help a tad.Even if they get an answering machine that might be more notice then what folks are getting now. Since they are going slow, are they working one area at a time? Can they notify folks that work will happen in there general area in the forseeable future? I hope they are keeping the weather in mind and not shutting gas off on days when its cold. this might be project to do in the summer only. The Gas Company is going to inconvenience people there is no way around that. I also wonder if these new meters will affect the bills in the future. As I understand it older meters tend to be less accurate and “bill” lower then newer meters. I looked at the town’s website and saw nothing there about this upgrade.
http://www.townofsmyrna.org/ The Gas department can and should do more to communicate this program to the residents of the town.
I thing it was mess up that her gas was cut off with out telling her their workers are not doing they are suppost to do
What I find “messed up” is journalist (writers, bloggers or whatever they choose to be called) that do not proof read before posting to the web or at least going back and editing their mistakes.
I understand that typo’s happen but I feel you could do better than my 5 grader. Granted she does use a dictionary.