Reading Municipal Light Department Creates App To Report & Monitor Outages

READING, MA — Reading Municipal Light Department, which serves Wilmington, is introducing its new mobile application providing smart phone access for customers to report outages and receive outage updates.

Other features include RMLD’s online store, “Pay my Bill” and “Watts Up?”, among other quick icon picks.

“While RMLD works to complete its long-term fully integrated outage management system, we found it to be critical to have an immediate interim means of communicating to our customers,” said RMLD general manager Coleen O’Brien. “An RMLD app integrated with Twitter was the perfect intermediate measure.”

The mobile app has a “Report an Outage” icon, where users can report loss of power, wires down, pole hits, sparking wires, tree limbs on wires, streetlights out, etc. It is directly linked to the RMLD Twitter account, which allows the RMLD Control Center to report on area outages, estimated restoration times and confirmation that the restoration is completed. The user does not need a Twitter account to follow Twitter on the RMLD app.

The “Report an Outage” and Twitter icons are intended to help mitigate the high-call volume to the Control Center during storms and area outages.

“With the unexpected magnitude of the storm of February 5 and 6, we decided to go live with the Twitter feature to communicate outage areas and expected restoration times,” said O’Brien. “Lots of folks, including police and fire in all four towns, appreciated the live and up-to-date communications. Better communications is consistent with our motto of ‘Be Efficient, Get Greener, Go Paperless.’”

The RMLD app was approved by Apple for iPhones and is ready for download. The Google approval process for Android should be released shortly. Under applications, on a smartphone, search for Reading Light Municipal. On a Twitter account, search for Reading Light.

(NOTE: The above press release is from RMLD.)

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