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OUR PRIORITY IS YOU

During an outage, Southwestern Electric works to restore service safely and quickly. How do we prioritize repairs?

  1. We begin by energizing our substations, which provide power to hundreds or thousands of members. 
  2. We move to large feeder circuits that serve multiple homes and businesses.
  3. We go to smaller, secondary lines that serve individual accounts.

The details vary from one storm to the next, but the overall objective is always the same, and that’s to restore power to the greatest number of members in the shortest time.

HOW IT'S DONE

During a storm, our outage response team reviews data from the co-op’s outage management system, survey reports from operations and engineering crews, and information from member outage calls. 

We combine those assets to build an overall damage assessment and develop our restoration plan. As our restoration effort moves forward, we review the plan and revise it, when appropriate, to incorporate new data and additional contract crews we’ve brought on to help.

The storm brings chaos, we answer it with order. We don’t want anyone to go without power a minute longer than necessary. That’s why we plan, prioritize, and repair and restore in the order we do.

This diagram illustrates the process.