It seems like the summer of 2024 has been one for the record books. It not only has been very hot (despite the fact that it is 74° in the middle of August as this article is being written), but there have been many severe storms throughout our entire service territory.
May 2024 saw three strong storm systems come through and cause major damage. May 7 had storms break a few poles in the Ziff area and knock down lines in Norris City, while the next night a storm with strong winds rolled through the northwest part of our service territory. This storm broke 15 poles and did considerable damage to many trees. Over 2,300 meters were out of power during the duration of these storms.
A few weeks later, a large storm system caused issues system wide on May 26. Thanks to our ability to switch from one transmission feed to another, we were able to quickly restore 3 substations after Ameren dropped their transmission feed. Over 14,000 meters were out throughout these storms, but many were due to whole substations temporarily dropping from Ameren before being switched to another feed to be restored.
Most recently, a major storm system blew through the area on August 1 and caused more damage than we have seen to the system in several years. Cleanup and restoration took up to three days in some areas. At the height of the outages, there were over 8,000 meters out of power all at the same time. It was all hands on deck as the Customer Service Representatives in the office took calls of info and outages non-stop all afternoon. Their info was then relayed to all of the crews to determine where they were to be sent as each report came in.
These pictures show just a handful of the damages our crews had to clean up and repair to restore power following the August storm. We thank our employees for their dedication to serving our members, and we thank our members for their patience and understanding as our crews worked in dangerous conditions until everyone had their power restored.
