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When the extent of storm damage to the electrical system is severe and widespread throughout the area,
company personnel cannot respond to every outage at once. Restoration activities must be prioritized.
In all situations, the safety of the public as well as those working to restore service is always the
overriding priority. These priorities are universal throughout the electrical utility industry.
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Public Safety Hazards
Our first priority is to quickly address public safety hazards, such as wires that are down across
major highways, burning wires or equipment or building fires. While downed power lines are being handled,
company personnel continue to assess the total damage to the electrical system's infrastructure and
begin restoring service.
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Public Health and Safety Facilities (Critical Customers)
Repair work that restores power to essential facilities that provide emergency services is a
high priority. This includes hospitals, police, fire and emergency facilities, water and sanitary
authorities, nursing homes and assisted living facilities, etc.
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Major Circuits
We continue rebuilding our system by next focusing on major circuits as we strive to restore power
to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible.
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Small Neighborhoods/Individual Homes
Once major circuits have been repaired, restoration efforts focus on smaller neighborhoods and
groups of customers served by a single transformer. Finally, service to individual homes and
businesses is restored as crews repair “service drops,” which are the wires that bring electricity
from the nearest pole to an individual building.
During outages, some customers may have power restored while their neighbors remain without service. This may
occur because not all circuits are repaired at the same time and different circuits may serve different parts
of the same neighborhood. Even houses on the same street might be served by different circuits or different
transformers.
In major storms, some customers may remain without power longer because the electrical lines are temporarily
inaccessible to work crews due to fallen trees, flooding, ice or other conditions that must be addressed before
the electrical facilities can be safely repaired.
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