Our team is working hard to keep the power flowing to our customers’ homes and businesses. August was a month of significant thunderstorm activity, especially during the afternoons and evenings. August 30th, just one such day, is illustrated in the below pictures in which lighting blanketed our service territory for a sustained period of time.

Lightning strikes affect not only overhead wires but also components of the system that are located underground as intense high energy discharges from lightning strikes find a path to ground. Our system includes devices to arrest these events and protect our equipment, but in some cases, these devices fail as well.

In anticipation of summer thunderstorms, we adjusted our staff schedules months ago to have extra crews on duty during the afternoon and evening hours. That includes added coverage on Saturdays to respond to weekend problems even quicker. In more than one case, our crews have worked through the night to restore service in time for the next day.

Construction work continues on our system hardening and reliability improvement projects. Our crews, combined with contractor crews, are working six days per week to build new infrastructure and make system modifications designed to reduce the number of outages. When we do experience an outage, reduce the number of customers affected and the duration of the outage.

And our System Operations team continually monitors the system and dispatches trouble crews to outages immediately as they occur. Regardless of the time of day or day of week our team is on site monitoring the delivery of electricity to your homes and businesses and standing by to respond to problems.

Thank you,

Ed Liberty