How to plan for an emergency

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT USERS

Are you reliant upon medical equipment that requires electricity to operate?

What happens when there is a power outage, and this equipment fails? Do you have a back-up plan?

Southern California Edison (SCE) provides the following tips to its customers: Emergencies and Rotating Power Outages

• All customers who depend upon electrically operated medical or life-support equipment for survival should be prepared at all times with a back-up power system or other plans necessary to ensure their health and welfare during outages.

SCE does not provide back-up generation.

• If the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) declares a rare Stage 3 Emergency and enacts rotating outages, Medical Baseline customers will be contacted with a pre-recorded telephone message.

SCE may only receive a 10-minute warning, so customers may not hear about the outage before it occurs.

• If a Public Safety Power Outage (PSPS) is called, SCE will attempt to reach its Medical Baseline customers through their alternate preferred method of contact (email, text, SMS, TTY). If your physician has indicated that your medical equipment is for life-sustaining purposes and SCE does not reach you directly through your preferred method of contact, it will send a technician to your door to make in-person contact to deliver the message regarding the PSPS event.

• To update contact information or cancel notifications, call 1-800-655-4555. For TTY service, call 1-800-352-8580.

SCE urges customers who use this type of equipment to create an emergency back-up plan, as follows.

• Work with the hospital or medical company that supplied your life-support device to develop a back-up plan. They may offer special services during an emergency.

• Contact your local office of emergency services to see if it keeps a list of customers with special medical needs.

• Keep emergency phone numbers handy, including those of your doctor and medical equipment company.

• Create a plan for leaving your home in the event of a lengthy outage, and share this plan with you family and friends.

• Keep a fully charged cell phone or spare portable power banks.

• For more emergency plan tips, visit www.redcross.org. Get Help If You Use Medical Equipment

If you or someone in your household requires the regular use of electrically powered medical equipment or other qualifying medical devices, you may be eligible for SCE’s Medical Baseline Allowance program.

This program provides an additional 16.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per day. Provided at the lowest baseline rate, this helps offset the cost of operating the medical equipment.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SCE temporarily changed how to enroll and recertify for the Medical Baseline program so that SCE customers can continue to benefit from this important program.

• Enrollments: Customers who use electrically powered medical equipment can temporarily enroll in the Medical Baseline Allowance program without a physician’s signature for a period of one year beginning March 4, 2020.

• Renewals: Customers already enrolled in the program who were due to renew between March 4, 2020, and April 16, 2021, will continue to be enrolled in the program.

These renewals will be postponed for one year from the original renewal date in 2020.

Call SCE Medical Baseline Program at 1-800-655-4555 for information or to register.

—Eloy Gomez, GRF safety and emergency coordinator, and Cindy Tostado, LCSW, GRF member resource and assistance liaison