Duquesne Light Company officials went before a group of leaders from across Allegheny County on Wednesday to discuss the company's newly released improvement plan following the April storm that left some of their customers without power for more than a week.

The company's presentation focused on improved communications and ways it hopes to speed up the process of power coming back on for customers.

"I think it's a step, a solid step," District 10 Councilperson DeWitt Walton said. "We were lucky. We don't have any details to say that anyone died. We can't take that chance for that to continue to happen. We all have to get better."

Other leaders, like state Rep. Abigail Salibury, were more critical.

"I am not satisfied with what I heard tonight," she said. "Really, to me, I think that what I have seen is a lack of respect for the human element of the storm response, the people who are elderly, who are low income, who are medically fragile."

Asked what specific mitigation measures the company could take, she said, "empathy, and I just haven't seen it."

A central question about the improvements the company is making is whether Duquesne Light will get the power back on sooner for customers.

"I can't say power would come on sooner for people," Salisbury said.

"The single biggest improvement that we have made in terms of our storm response effort has been in how can we force multiply and scale up two, three, four fold than we have ever done before as a utility," said Ben Cain, DLC's operations center director.

He said Duquesne Light is looking at plans and procedures that can enable it to expand its response effort to 2,000 mutual aid contractors. The company used 600 contractors after the April storm and only needed 200 at most before that.

"What we're ultimately looking to accomplish is transfer control and decentralized operations so that our operation center is not the bottleneck, but things are being managed locally," Cain said.

DLC has also given its field crews more access to internal systems, it says, speeding up restoration. Duquesne Light also promises more accurate estimated restoration times.

"We know that having this information is really important for our customers to make improvements to their moving forward," a Duquesne Light official said.

Improving communication took up a significant part of the DLC presentation. The company said it should be easier to use its automated phone line because it is adding ports, and it is working on an online chatbot.

"Moving forward together is purposeful," said Brian Guzek, DLC vice president of operations. "We can talk a lot about how we really learn from each other, and so improving those communications with customers, we know we have to get better, and we really are looking at continuous improvement.

The company is also looking to expand training and coordinate better with local municipalities. DLC officials had cancelled prior appearances in front of the small group of leaders on short notice, saying they were not ready yet.

Duquesne Light explains storm response improvements