During a summer storm, a bolt of lightning strikes a power pole near your home. Your lights flicker briefly, then go out. Things become quiet as your home’s devices, with their motors and fans, stop running.
To report the outage, you call Lynches River Electric Cooperative. The more members who call, the more quickly we can pinpoint the outage location.
Our Outage Management System helps us to determine outage locations and direct crews to the affected areas. As a line crew pushes their dinner aside and heads out to the outage location, the system operator is estimating the number of members without service.
The line crew slowly drives through the affected area, inspecting every pole, wire and transformer. The cause of the outage is quickly discovered—a burn mark across the surface of a transformer means the transformer has blown. The crew readies their truck and equipment, ensuring it’s safe to begin working.
When you’re experiencing a power outage, you want it to end as soon as possible. But our lineworkers must be deliberate and cautious when working around high-voltage electricity. Lineworkers must follow standard procedures and safety requirements to ensure the repair is effective and sound. Working that way may take a little extra time, but it means our lineworkers make it home safely.
Less than an hour after finding the cause of the outage, the crew loads its tools and gear back onto the trucks. This time, the problem was easy to spot, the repair was straightforward, and the weather cooperated. But no two outages are exactly alike. The next outage could occur in severe weather or be located far off a main road. It could involve a fallen tree that needs to be cut with chainsaws or a broken utility pole that needs to be replaced. In any case, our lineworkers will always get to the location and fix the problem as quickly as safety allows.
Outages can occur from a variety of causes—fallen trees, vehicle crashes and even curious critters, like snakes and squirrels. Our members may not always know the cause of an outage, or what was involved in restoring power, but thanks to our lineworkers, the lights come on and life goes back to normal.
This is why your cooperative invests in technologies and equipment that protect the power grid and prevent outages. And it’s also why the lineworkers, who put themselves at risk to return your life to normal, are some of our favorite people.
