Weathering the storms

In the January edition of the magazine, I wrote about being prepared for an ice storm. As the manager, I find this is a constant concern every winter. I hope and pray that each year passes without such a storm, so our members don’t experience extended outages. As February ended this year, I breathed a sigh of relief as I felt confident we had gotten lucky and the worst was behind us with no ice storms this winter.

March decided to bring a new foe as it roared in like a lion with high winds in our service area on Friday, March 3 . According to the National Weather Service, wind speeds were between 55 and 70 miles per hour that evening. Over the next four days, we would see a total of 113 outages and at the peak of outages, more than 60 % of our member’s meters were without power. At the beginning of the storm, the Panhandle and West Union substations were without power due to a broken AEP transmission pole that provides the electricity to those substations. AEP was able to fix the pole the next day after the winds calmed down and the substations were re-energized about 24 hours after they initially lost power.

Erika Ackley GENERAL MANAGER

Trees that had fallen and brought down electric lines caused almost all of the outages. Some of these were near our lines, but many fell from outside the cooperative’s 40 -foot right-of-way, which extends 20 feet on each side of the electric lines. These outages take a long time to restore, as trees must be cleared off the lines and the lines put back up. We also had to replace 13 broken poles on the system.

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