When the extent of damage is severe and widespread throughout the area, DLC personnel cannot respond to every outage at once. In all situations, the safety of the public as well as those working to restore service is always top priority. Just remember we're constantly working and we will get to your outage no matter what.
We handle restoring power in the following order:
1 — Public Safety Hazards such as downed wires across highways and major roads, burning wires and equipment.
2 — Public Health and Safety Facilities:
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.
3 — Major Circuits:
We prioritize restoring power to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible.
4 — Small Neighborhoods/Individual Homes:
Once major circuits have been repaired, efforts focus on smaller neighborhoods and groups of customers served by a single transformer. We then work to repair service drops, which are the wires that bring electricity from the nearest pole to an individual home or 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.