With hurricane season underway, we want you to know we’re ready. Being in the top 2% nationwide in reliability doesn’t happen by letting things go unnoticed. We make sure trees are trimmed around power lines, hold corrosion patrols along our beach areas to check the equipment that sits in the salt air, and have mutual aid crews from other electric companies on standby should a storm head this way.
When a storm is predicted to impact our customers, we jump right into our Emergency Action Plan. It’s all hands on deck. Employees in departments that won’t be impacted by the storm slip into other support roles, like booking hotels for assisting crews and making sure everyone is fed throughout the storm.
Line crews know there will be long hours ahead, away from their families, sometimes sleeping in crew quarters. They gas up the line trucks, load all the necessary equipment, and head out as soon as there are outages – and as long as it is safe to do so. Bucket trucks can’t go up in winds stronger than 35 miles per hour.
We work around the clock, to not only restore power but also to keep you informed on when power may be restored. Our generating stations must get the power running to our transmission lines. Those larger lines are often in rural, swampy areas that can be hard to reach, especially in challenging weather conditions.
Transmission lines feed our substations, which then feed our distribution lines that lead to your home. We work to restore critical services, like hospitals, first. Then we concentrate on repairing lines and equipment that restore power to the largest number of homes at once before working on power lines that feed fewer homes. We continue until everyone can turn on their lights.
We know, as customers, you feel a sense of relief when your power is back on after a storm. We breathe a sigh of relief, too, because restoring your power is very important to us. Then, it’s always nice to get back to our families after the job is done. For more information about how you can prepare for a hurricane, visit our website .