Photo by Hoffman.

According to a Washington Post special report they are. For those who live in the Maryland suburbs this doesn’t quite come as a surprise, after sustained outages following the snowstorms in February and thunderstorms in July.

However, the Washington Post article doesn’t even factor outages that were due to weather. Pepco customers experienced 70% more outages than big-city customers of other electric companies that took part in one 2009 survey. Once the power went out, Pepco took, on average, twice as long to restore power than other electric companies serving metropolitan areas. In the past few years, Pepco has been cited as one of the least reliable power companies around the country, according to various surveys.

Blame the trees: Pepco has always said that most of the power outages are related to branches intertwined with power lines. Pepco even says that the District has the fourth most dense tree canopy in the country. However, the Washington Post spoke to Forest Service officials who doubted Pepco’s claim, saying that D.C.’s tree cover is average for American cities.

Beyond that, nearly two-thirds of Pepco’s District customers get their electricity from power lines that are below ground. However, 80 percent of Pepco’s Maryland customwers get electricity from power lines that are aboveground – a large reason why Maryland has experienced more frequent and sustained power outages.

Further, the Post analysis found that Pepco equipment failures, not trees, caused the most sustained power interruptions in the last year (not including weather-related outages). Pepco’s own records show that in 2009 equipment failures caused 44 percent of power outages. Trees accounted for 24 percent of outages.

At least Pepco doesn’t deny that they are having reliability problems. I’ve heard a few radio ads from them promising that they’re working on the problem, and the officials that spoke to the Washington Post acknowledged the issues they had. And they are spending money to make it better: in 2009, just in Maryland, Pepco spent $8.5 million on maintenance of their equipment, and another $6 million on tree maintenance.

The full report is worth a read.