MEMPHIS, Tenn. — MLGW President and CEO J.T. Young apologized to the people of Memphis and the Memphis City Council on Tuesday about the utility company's slow and largely criticized response to restoring power after this month's ice storm. He also promised significant improvements in the short and long term.
Wednesday morning, Young shared the same presentation with Shelby County Commissioners.
Young told city council members about plans to form an outage improvement advisory team in March, with recommendations planned to be presented in June.
Young said the ice storm put trauma on MLGW's aging infrastructure and impacted outage communications for customers.
MLGW leaders promised to address the lessons learned.
That included giving customers better estimates on how long they'd be without power, considering staging crews for certain locations sooner, providing more up-to-date information to MLGW's customer care team, and re-evaluating and tweaking the utility's damage assessment strategy.
"We didn't meet the expectations that our customers had and that is not how we want to be," Young said. "As we move forward, we want to make sure that we are better. We have a vision of safely delivering services that improve customer experiences and we want to make sure we do that. We want to nail that and we know we didn't in this storm. We know we can get better, we are going to be better.
More than half of all MLGW customers dealt with power outages at some point following this month's ice storm.
Plans are also being finalized ahead of the threat of severe weather on Thursday.
You can check out MLGW's action plan HERE.