It was a "misunderstanding" that led to PPL crews being pulled off the job of restoring power to 1,326 Nesquehoning customers left shivering in the dark after an October 2011 snowstorm, a utility company executive said.

News outlets fought for years to make the information public, and on May 25, the state Supreme Court ruled that PPL and the PUC could no longer keep it secret.The information was released Wednesday."Changing the assignment for this crew was a mistake," PPL President Greg Dudkin said in a letter to employees Wednesday.It turns out the crews were diverted from Nesquehoning to Tamaqua, where 226 customers were out of power, after "a miscommunication.""Dave Bonenberger, vice president-distribution operations, contacted the Hazleton storm room inquiring about an outage in his neighborhood. The outage affected his house and 225 other customers. He did not ask that a crew be reassigned. But supervisors in the storm room thought that was what he meant," Dudkin wrote.Bonenberger issued an apology."I regret that my actions led to a misunderstanding, and I especially regret that some of our customers had a longer power outage as a result. PPL's employees are known for their dedication and hard work in power restorations, and I would never want to do anything to tarnish that reputation," he wrote.Dudkin wrote that the crew had been assigned to the Nesquehoning job at 10:40 p.m., and then left that job at 11:44 p.m. for a required rest period."The next morning, the crew was first assigned to repair the outage in Bonenberger's neighborhood in the Tamaqua area before being sent back to the Nesquehoning job. This delay in returning to Nesquehoning meant that power restoration there took four hours longer than it otherwise would have," he wrote.In his letter, Dudkin explained why his company fought to keep the information from the public."Our investigation determined that this was a misunderstanding that led to actions not consistent with our policy, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest. We quickly took steps to prevent it from happening again. At that point, we decided to work with the PUC on a settlement," he wrote."Because confidentiality was required by our settlement and because confidentiality is an important component of the commission's investigations, we joined the PUC in defending it when it was challenged in court."Now that the court has ruled, providing these details is the right thing to do," Dudkin wrote.The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader and The Morning Call in August 2013, after the settlement became public, initiated the original suit to force release of the details.The news consortium is represented by Harrisburg attorney Craig J. Staudenmaier.The information included details of a PPL employee's tip to the PUC that the power company had diverted the crews.The tip launched an investigation, and the PUC found PPL at fault, and PPL paid a $60,000 settlement with the commission.As part of the settlement agreement, PPL would not disclose details of where the crew was sent, the locations of where the restoration was delayed when the crew was diverted, who sent them and who benefited from the diversion.PPL spokesman Paul Wirth on April 23, 2015, told the Times News the diversion was the "result of a misunderstanding that led a lower-level supervisor to make a wrong assignment for one repair crew."A consortium of news outlets, including the Times News, joined the Times Leader and The Morning Call in asking the state Office of Open Records to order the information released. But PPL and the PUC appealed to Commonwealth Court, arguing the information was confidential. Commonwealth Court in December ruled in their favor. The Supreme Court ruling overturned that decision."As is standard practice, confidentiality was part of the settlement. The news media challenged that confidentiality," Dudkin wrote in his letter to employees.He said PPL has learned a lesson.We are a company of people," he wrote. "And people sometimes can have a lapse in judgment. It's important that we learn from our mistakes."