Comcast is waiving early termination fees and has stopped billing residential and business customers whose service was affected by the flood that washed through Ellicott City last Saturday night.
The announcement and an apology to customers came after one business, Park Ridge Trading Co., took to Facebook on Thursday to lash out against a $600 termination fee it said Comcast was charging to disconnect service that had been wiped out in the flood.
“We’re really sorry we contributed to the stress during what is already a difficult time,” said Aimee Metrick, Comcast’s vice president of public relations for the Beltway region.
Comcast contacted Park Ridge directly to apologize, she said.
A spokesman for Howard County Executive Allan H. Kittleman said the county has reached out to Verizon and Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. to ask the utilities to work with customers affected by the flood, but had not received complaints from residents about those providers.
Verizon said it will also waive early termination fees for customers who need to discontinue their service because of flood damage.
As of Friday afternoon, about 215 BGE customers in Ellicott City were still without electricity and 85 were without gas.
While BGE was able to restore power to most customers in the area, remaining outages, which are clustered around the stretch of Main Street that suffered the worst damage, can’t be repaired until the area is deemed safe for work crews, said Justin Mulcahy, a BGE spokesman.
In the meantime, BGE will hold bills for customers who are still without service and will evaluate each on a case-by-case basis once service is restored.
The utility is also suspending the accounts of businesses that won’t be reopening any time soon to prevent any charges they would normally incur.
Mulcahy encouraged customers to report outages and any problems with billing.
“There may be individual situations out there that we may not be aware of,” he said.
twitter.com/sarahgantz
