When the lights flickered on and off around 7:30 p.m. one muggy evening last month in Parkville’s Cromwood Coventry neighborhood, Beth Schmidt heard pops, then a knock at her door. Someone told her, “Your backyard’s on fire.”
That same corner of her yard, where a rabbit shed stands beside a peach tree, had caught fire three times in almost two years. Residents nearby said the Sept. 3 outage brought more than inconvenience. They described popping noises, explosions, vibrating power lines and, in some homes, the kind of damage that leaves a person staring at dead appliances and wondering what just hit the house.
Schmidt said the line also ignited bushes in Jeff Karowich’s yard. Eric Wicklein said the controller boxes for his nursery’s water pumps were fried. By the time more than 30 residents gathered at an emergency community meeting on Sept. 22, they were listing blown light bulbs, fried surge protectors, tripped breakers and damage to appliances and HVAC systems. The complaints were not abstract. They were counted one by one, and they all pointed back to the same night.
Nick Alexopulos said the Sept. 3 outage was caused by a fault on an overhead line, but the cause of that fault remains under investigation. He also said BGE could not definitively say storm conditions caused it, even though storms were affecting the service area over several days. That leaves residents with a sharp mismatch: a utility fault on the record, but no final answer for why it happened or why the damage seemed to spread beyond a single house or two.
BGE said it had already done engineering reviews, field inspections, voltage monitoring, reliability assessments and vegetation assessments in the Haverhill/Cromwood Coventry area. Engineers did not identify evidence of sustained abnormal voltage conditions on the electric distribution system, Alexopulos said, cutting against the idea of a prolonged surge. But residents had already contacted the utility after both outages, and the history around the neighborhood is hard to ignore: three house fires followed a Feb. 16, 2025 outage on Haverhill Road, and residents say this latest incident feels uncomfortably familiar.
The practical advice is familiar too. Mumtaz Hussain Soomro said a power surge is a brief increase in electrical voltage that can damage appliances and electronics, and utility companies recommend unplugging sensitive equipment during an outage so circuits are not overloaded when power returns. For Schmidt, though, that explanation does not settle the larger question. She is still left with a yard that has burned again, and a neighborhood waiting to learn whether Sept. 3 was a one-off fault or the latest sign of a deeper problem BGE has not yet found.
