From the Top with CEO Patrick Grace

What a month we've had. I'm not sure any of us could've predicted an October ice storm, but here we are in the aftermath looking back at what it meant for us and you.

I want to start off by saying how grateful I am to have such a great team here at OEC — from the linemen and dispatchers to those taking outage calls, running food to workers and everyone in between. Although it's been five years since the last major outage event, everyone knew their roles and performed them well. They put in long, hard hours to get all our members back on and, after seven days for some, the job was finished — for the most part. Thankfully, the weather allowed us to work around-theclock, which typically isn't the case with an ice storm in January and February where it continues to re-freeze overnight.

True recovery will take a while, as temporary fixes are in place until permanent repairs can be made in some areas. We appreciate our power supplier's (Western Farmers Electric Cooperative, WFEC) efforts to bring generators onsite to get members in the Tuttle area back online while repairs continue. WFEC lost 19 miles of transmission lines and structures, and work continues to repair that damage.

This was the first real storm that has tested our system since we began prioritizing system upgrades and strengthening. We continue that work as we focus on a small portion of our system each year.

We talk a lot about reliability here, and our efforts to strengthen our system the past several years definitely helped us. We lost 180 poles, compared to over 500 poles in the 2015 ice storm. I'm proud of the focus we've put on upgrading and maintaining our system to prepare for events like this — especially our vegetation management efforts. I know not everyone likes to see trees cut or trimmed, but I hope you understand our mission behind those practices: to always keep the lights on — and the HVAC running.

Going into this storm, we knew our fiber network hadn't been tested by a major storm. We felt the fiber network held up really well with only a few outages. The storm didn't put us too far behind in continuing our build-out, either, as we just connected our 16,000th subscriber.

In conclusion, I want to extend a special thank you to our contractor crews, Ozarks Electric Cooperative and Rich Mountain Electric Cooperative crews and everyone else who helped minimize the impact of this ice storm. It's one we won't soon forget.