It was a terrible time to worry about basic utilities failing, but fail they did.
And Cathy Eshmont's life hasn't been the same since.
It was a dark, cold February night, and Eshmont had just arrived back at her Dunloggin home with her 87-year-old mother, Edna Milbrodt, who'd recently had a fall and who doctors said had little time left to live.
Eshmont's plan was to give her mother dignity in death, to set her up in a warm room and use hospice services to comfort her.
Then, at about midnight, the power went out. Eshmont had a back-up battery for her mother's oxygen machine, but she couldn't hold off the darkness and the cold.
"I didn't have three hands to deal with the flashlight, the morphine bottle, the morphine dropper," Eshmont said.
She called Gilchrist Hospice Care, which sent a team of people to pick up her and her mother at 2 in the morning.
Her mother, scared, "screamed horribly," Eshmont recalled.
Milbrodt died a day later.
The entire experience was "extremely horrific," Eshmont said. "She didn't have the dignity of dying at my home, at our pace, the way we wanted it to be."
Eshmont's Ellicott City home had long had power problems, but this random, unpredictable outage pushed her over the edge.
"After that I said, 'OK, whatever it takes.' I'm in this fight for the long haul now," she said.
Ever since, she has waged a battle to force BGE to be more accountable for the reliability of its services — not only in Dunloggin or Ellicott City, but countywide. She has spent hundreds of hours gathering information and reaching out to other neighborhoods with power problems, all in pursuit of improved efforts by BGE to prevent outages and faster response times from the company when outages occur.
"I'm not going to go away," Eshmont said. "I'm not going to forget about it."
Problems in pockets
To some residents in Howard County, Eshmont's fight may seem surprising.
After all, Howard County doesn't experience that many power outages compared to neighboring counties, according to Rachael Lighty, a BGE spokeswoman.
"This isn't a widespread problem across Howard County," Lighty said. "Historically, Howard County has better reliability as a whole on average."
But there are specific, older, more heavily wooded neighborhoods in the county that experience more frequent problems than the average county neighborhood, Lighty said. And it's those residents who are complaining.
"If it's just a small group of homes, they don't care. You're going to be left behind," said Maria Kirchhofer, who lives on Beaverbrook Road in Columbia and said her neighborhood experiences regular outages.
"We're trying to find a way to get BGE to simply get us to a point where our reliability and our service responsiveness is on par with our neighbors," said Greg Kelly, another Dunloggin resident who has lived on Bado Court for 46 years. "We're always at the bottom of the list when it comes to service response."
Lighty acknowledged the standard of service in some neighborhoods isn't at the level residents or BGE want it to be, and said the company is "committed to these areas of Howard County and will continue working with the residents to address their specific needs."
But Lighty dismissed the idea that BGE gives short shrift to such neighborhoods.
"Even though they may feel like they are a smaller community, they're definitely not farther down on the priority list," she said. "BGE will absolutely treat that project with the same amount of respect as other projects."
Countywide, there are "definitely a multitude of things that amount to the outages that people may experience, and why they may vary from neighborhood to neighborhood and year to year," Lighty said.
"There are probably several reasons why they may have had consistent — I don't want to say consistent problems — but problems over the years," she said. "I think it does depend on the geography, the foliage, how aggressive we're able to trim (trees), the age of the infrastructure, and just the weather that year."
Recently, BGE has made changes to the power infrastructure in Dunloggin, similar to the changes the company is now promising in the Font Hill neighborhood, and the situation in Dunloggin has improved, according to both residents and BGE officials.
Still, problems persist, and more and more residents, in Dunloggin and elsewhere, are standing up to represent their neighborhoods in what they see as a fight against BGE.
Outrage, complaints
The Dunloggin neighborhood, with Eshmont leading the pack, recently filed a complaint against BGE with the state's Public Service Commission, demanding the company provide more reliable power. They are doggedly pursuing that complaint now, despite PSC's response to the neighbors that it believes BGE has made a good faith effort to make improvements in the neighborhood.
Residents in the Font Hill neighborhood recently managed to draw attention to their cause by voicing their outrage over outages at a public meeting, as noted in an article last week in the Howard County Times.
And Kirchhofer, who has lived on Beaverbrook for the last four years, has recently stepped up her efforts to rally her neighbors to demand more regular maintenance and infrastructure improvements from BGE as well, helping to organize a petition, contacting local officials and making her voice known, she said.
"Now I'm really getting more into it," she said. "I guess I'm just one of those people that I see something that's just not right — and this is way past not right — and I just act on it."
According to Eshmont, there are often one or two people like Kirchhofer in each neighborhood being affected, and her newest goal is to connect them all.
The idea came to her back in September, she said, when she saw grassroots uprisings gain momentum in the Middle East through the use of social networks.
"I was doing some reading and looking at what different protest groups had done overseas, like the Arab Spring, and what technology they were using," Eshmont said. "I decided to give it a whirl, to see what happened, to see if I could troll around and find other people."
Eshmont started a Twitter account and created the group "Reliability4HOCO" on Facebook. There she posts updates from her research and notes on conversations she has with elected officials.
Not alone
So far, 25 people have followed her Facebook group, and it has helped Eshmont and others realize they aren't alone in having troubles with BGE, she said.
"At the very least, the Facebook effort has brought some of us out of our neighborhoods, to say, 'Wait a minute, we were in isolated pockets, we didn't know about each other,' " Eshmont said.
Eshmont hopes she can sustain momentum in her efforts, even after Hurricane Irene becomes a distant memory, she said.
While she believes BGE expects some backlash and organization among residents following a big storm, she also thinks they expect that backlash to die off.
"They count on us to forget. They count on us having other things in our lives and moving on," the retired national security employee said.
"But this is something that I have the energy and the ability to do, so I guess this is going to be my full-time, part-time job for a while."
