You have heard the old proverb that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but what does it mean when January comes in like a lion? The new year started off with a major winter blast that we will not soon forget.
Weather forecasts started hinting at a winter storm just before the new year, prompting people to start preparing in case of the worst. While people began emptying grocery store shelves, at Wayne-White Electric we began preparing equipment, employees, trucks, contract crews, and more for what turned out to be an ugly winter storm. Much of our service territory received mostly snow with a little bit of ice, but there was a line of damaging ice and snow that covered the southern portion of our territory. And in case you did not already know, ice and electric lines do not mix well! Add trees into the mix and it just goes downhill from there.
Starting Sunday afternoon on January 5, 2025, we received our first call for an outage, and it snowballed (literally) from there. By Sunday night, we had over 600 members out of power with our crews out working diligently in the dark, cold, snow and ice trying to find ways to restore power. At 10:30 p.m. the City of Fairfield's transmission feed was dropped. Thanks to the switching work we did in 2024 that gave us access to transmission feeds from four different directions, the over 3,500 meters were restored in five minutes by employees of Hoosier Energy sitting in Bloomington, Indiana.
Naturally, overnight there were several more outages caused by ice, wind, and trees that added to our total. By midnight Sunday/Monday, over 4,700 meters had been out at one point since the start of the outages. By 7 a.m., outages were down to 300 members. The light of day helped crews find more issue areas that were hard to find in the dark. With many crews working throughout the day after working all night, the outages were knocked down to just seven members by 11 p.m. Monday evening. Those remaining outages were all ones that had the most damage and hardest repairs to make. Keep in mind, there were multiple other outages throughout the day, totaling over 2,700 new outages just during Monday alone.
After a few hours of rest, the guys got back to work Tuesday and were able to turn on the remaining seven members by 3 p.m. on Tuesday. It was not without having to restore over 40 new outages that came in on Tuesday as well!
Even though we were hit hard enough, those farther south of us were hit even harder, with outages lasting up to 5-7 days. We even sent a crew of four linemen down to Southeastern Electric Cooperative to aid in their efforts for three days following all repairs and restorations in our territory. Below, we have provided some statistics from this outage event that we thought you might find interesting:
• The average amount of hours our guys worked from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon totaled 24 hours. Many worked over 30 hours in that same time, with at least a handful working over 40 hours. Talk about dedication!
• We received 649 reports of outages. 150 of those calls came into the office during office hours and 125 outages were entered through the SmartHub app. 279 of 374 calls that came in after hours were reported through our automated system.
• Obstacles faced by crews not only included trees down, icy roads, and the weather in general, but many other things such as: bottoms of the buckets freezing, making it hard to stand up in their bucket; finding lines down that are the type of wire that we do not use anymore and having to make do with what was there; getting trucks stuck in the ice/snow and delaying progress; flat tires or trucks overheating, and so many other things we would never think of.
We would like to thank the many people and businesses that helped us out, including Brian Henderson of Henderson Equipment, Brandon Barbre, Jack Sailer, John Carter, and so many other members even with your kind and encouraging words for our crews and employees. We are grateful to serve a wonderful membership! But...let's hope we don't have to experience this kind of event again for a good long while for everyone's sake!
