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Live Wire is a podcast powered by Kosciusko REMC. Here we discuss co-op matters, energy, community topics, and communicate with KREMC members.
Andrea: Welcome to Live Wire, a podcast powered by Kosciusko REMC. We are a member-owned and locally operated cooperative that supplies electricity to portions of Kosciusko, Fulton, Wabash, and Whitley Counties here in Northern Indiana. Live Wire is a program where we come together to discuss co-op matters, energy, community topics, and to communicate with KREMC members. I'm your host, Andrea Melton.
Welcome back to another episode of Live Wire, where we bring you insights into how KREMC works to serve our community. As you know, our mission is to provide safe, reliable power to all our members, but sometimes Mother Nature throws us a curve ball and things don't go quite as smoothly as everyone would like.
Recently, we experienced a significant microburst storm in our area that caused major outages across our service area, and we know that in times like these, our members understandably have questions, particularly how does the restoration process work? How do we decide where to send our line crews and who gets their power restored first?
So today I'm very excited to have Mike Whitaker, our assistant manager of operations and a former lead lineman to help shed some light on how the power restoration process works during these big outages. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mike: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Andrea: Very excited to have you and happy co-op month as we just kicked off October and it's National co-op month.
Let's get started. Can you give us a quick overview of what happens right after a big storm hits? What is the first thing the line crew does when they know there are widespread outages?
Mike: So the first thing that happens is during the week we have one lineman, he is responsible to be on call for basically the whole week, and that's from Friday after work until Friday morning of the next week. When he's on call, we have a call net system, they manage all of our outages after normal business hours, and they will notify him that he has an outage. He'll then pull that up on his map on his iPad and he can see that there's 10 people out, there's 20 people out.
And if a storm hits, basically he gets bombarded with hundreds and hundreds of text messages and several calls from that call management system stating that, "Hey, we have a lot of outages." At that time, he will then call me, he'll call John Justice, the operations manager, and we will then come to the office. We have computer software that helps us determine exactly how many people are without power, and then, at that point, we will take over for the calls management system so that we can determine exactly how many people we have out and what direction we're going to go.
And at that time, when we realized we have a substantial number of members out, we'll then call our other linemen in and apprentices and groundmen. They'll come in and then we'll dispatch them out to the areas that have the highest number of members out.
Andrea: So that leads into what I was going to ask next. When it comes to restoring the power, what factors are considered in determining where you are sending the crews first and what that priority system looks like?
Mike: So there's a couple of things that determine what area you're going to respond to. The first thing is all of our substations are kind of built in areas where we have either high industrial load or high residential load. Each substation manages the voltage of electricity, and then there's four circuits that disperse out. So one circuit can go north, the other one goes south, east and west.
And we'll have two different types of outages. We can have an outage where our power provider, which would be Wabash Valley or NIPSCO or Duke, they can lose their feed coming into our substation and our alarms will tell us if we don't really have a lot of issues with down power lines, things like that. We just don't have power coming into our substation.
So that's a really quick fix because we have capability to backfeed from other substations and we can get that sub up and running relatively pretty quick. Now, what happened in the storm here last week or two weeks ago, we had lots of trees down. We had trampolines in power lines.
Andrea: Right. I think everybody saw that photograph or those. Oh my goodness.
Mike: So in that situation, that knocks out our whole substation, that whole circuit out of that substation, and then we know that basically if one circuit has a thousand people on it, then that's a high priority because it's a main circuit out of our substation.
So we're going to send somebody to that circuit. He has to go out there and then drive out, basically, all of the line that is fed from that one circuit in the substation. So it's dark, it's raining, it's windy, there's trees down across the road, and then he has to find out exactly what caused that circuit to open up.
So the picture of the trampoline, obviously, that was one instance of what caused that line to open up. And then on down the road a mile or so, there could have been 25 trees that were blown down across the road and every single power line is down. There's broken poles.
So in that situation, what we try and do is we try and isolate from where the wire is damaged. We will try and get the power on up to that point, so at least the people that are capable of getting power can get their power restored. So we try and do that first. In that situation, the lineman has to make it safe so that he can work on that power line after he's addressed the problem.
Andrea: Right. There's so many moving parts, so many factors, obviously.
Mike: Yeah, there is. Yep. So basically, he will isolate the area that has a lot of damage. We will energize or heat up, we'll get power restored to those people that were out. Say they're out for an hour or two hours, we get power back onto them. And you still may have another three, 400 people that are without power because there's extensive work that needs to be done before they can be restored.
And then that's where we will ... we'll have crews all over doing this all over our territory, and so they will call in and let us know, "Hey, we have four broken poles in this area. We have wire down in this area." We take notes and we go around and assess our whole system or wherever the damage is reporting, basically, on the tech side where we can see where all the damage is and then we'll take notes and then disperse from there.
Andrea: Do you guys think about if there's a certain situation where, "Hey, we can get this done really quickly, this one's going to take more time." You maybe do the easy fix first and then go to the big issue?
Mike: Yes. That plays a big part in it. If we have a lightning storm, that's usually pretty quick because lightning just ... it'll blow our fuse or it just knocks out the line and there's really not a lot of damage, so we can just go out, get it back on pretty quick. But when we have high winds, that's our biggest enemy is high winds because trees blow over. The trees fall onto our power lines, and then the power lines basically are pushed to the ground and that's what breaks our poles.
So broken poles are real time consuming. You have to call in locates to make sure it's safe to dig, to make sure there's no underground power lines there, cable, phone, gas, internet. So you are waiting on other services to come out and tell us that, "Hey, it is safe for you to dig here." And then you can imagine probably one pole would take about two to three hours depending on the severity, how much equipment's on that pole.
I think in this last storm we had over 20 broken poles, so you can figure three hours per pole. At that time when we realized that we do have a lot of time consuming work like that, we will start to call in outside help. So it's co-op month, right? So we reach out to our other cooperatives and we say, "Hey, we need help. Can you send a couple guys to come help us? We got hit really hard. We have a lot of time sensitive work or time consuming work."
And they will bring guys in, and then we kind of get rolling on those jobs that take a little bit longer and those guys aren't as familiar with our system. So we kind of put those on jobs where they're going to be for two or three hours, and then our guys are going around the system that they are familiar with, "Hey, I can get them on pretty quick. I'm going to do it." These people here, they'll call in and say they've got more broken poles, they're going to have to wait until these outside crews can go fix it.
Andrea: So if we have a member who has a question like, "I just don't understand the neighborhood next to us, their power's been back on and we've still been hours and hours." How would you answer that or respond to them to break it down so they understand why they're waiting and they see people nearby who are not?
Mike: Sure. So the main lines that come out of our substations, there's actually three, it's called three-phase. So you have three wires that have 7,200 volts on them. All three phases can go north on a road and two phases can feed to the east. One can be on the north side of the road and the other one will be on the south side of the road.
So there could have been a pole or a tree that came down and broke the wire on the south side of the road. So that addition's going to be without power. The one on the north side, everything was okay, so they're still going to be with power, so you could be on the north side of the road and look to the south side and say, "Hey, they don't have any power, but we do." The people without power are like, "How's that possible?" So it's just because there was damage and the damage took the line out, and that's why they don't have power.
Andrea: Yeah. Thank you very much. It's a very clear explanation for something that I know seems really complicated and confusing and, of course, frustrating for people when these things happen.
Mike, is there anything else that determines how this process goes and who you go to first when these outages happen that we should know about? Something I have missed?
Mike: So I talked about the main substations and the three phase lines, and when there's damage, we heat up to that point or energize up to that point, and we try and get the largest amount of people back on as quick as we can. Then we branch out to the smaller outage areas. So if we can get on a thousand people pretty quick, we're going to try and focus on that first. Then we're going to branch out to the smaller outages that may be two or 300.
So if you live on a country road and you are one person, unless we have a crew that's driving by and it looks like it's really easy to fix, it's going to be towards the end of the restoration time just because that one person is, I hate to say it, it's one person. Our members are all important to us, but if we can get on 50 people versus one person, that's how the progression works.
Andrea: Right. It only makes sense.
Mike: Yeah, I think you hear it a lot is, "I live at the very end of the line and I'm always the last person to get turned on or my power restored." That's not always necessarily true. If you live at the end of the line, you could have a lot of trees on your line. There's a lot of different factors. You could have a lot of squirrels, a lot of raccoons at night, things like that. But as far as storm progression goes, that's kind of the most amount of people that we can get on at one time and then we'll gradually go down to the fewest.
Andrea: Absolutely. That makes sense to me. Man, I feel like you've covered so much already. Is there anything else that you would like the members who are listening to understand about the hard work that goes into getting the lights back on, and especially the dedication of our line crew during these events?
Mike: Just please be patient with us. We know that your power's out. We know that it is an inconvenience. When it storms, our guys, our schedule is they're going to work 16 hours and then we allow them to go home so that they can get eight hours of sleep. And so they have to go home and get sleep.
In that eight hours, they got to take a shower, they got to get some food and then come back, so it's not like they're totally sleeping for eight hours. And then if they feel that they can go a little bit longer, we allow them to go a little bit longer. So some of the guys can. They'll work 18, 19 hours. Usually, we only allow that if we feel like we can get everybody's power restored within 24 hour period.
But we understand it's an inconvenience and we are trying as fast as we can to do it. It's just sometimes it's very labor intensive. The last storm, in order to even get to where the damage was, we had to have a tree crew come in and they cut for about six hours just to remove trees and branches and everything that was in the road because our trucks couldn't even get to where it was. And it was on a main road.
Just when you look out your window, it may be clear and why is my power out? But it could be a mile down the road. There could be 20 trees across the road and have four or five poles broken.
Andrea: Yep, absolutely.
Mike: Yeah. And safety is always our number one concern. We have to make sure that our workers can do the work safely. We want to make sure that the public is safe as well. So we can't just heat a line up and not know what is out there. So we have to be able to determine if the line is safe to reenergize.
And after a storm, everybody likes to go outside and kind of look at the damage. If there are any power lines that are down, always assume that they're not safe to go around, stay far away from them, and just call in and report that they are down.
Andrea: Very good.
Mike: And even though you report it, it doesn't always mean that we're going to get there ... we will get there as soon as we can. So in a storm, if you have three to 4,000 people out, we may take 2,000 to 2,500 phone calls and those phone calls are reported. And when we get to the severity of them, that's when we dispatch out to those. But every call is important, and we assure you that we do get those calls, so I ask that you be patient.
Andrea: Right. Patience is a virtue.
Mike: Yeah.
Andrea: Well, I know our crew put in a lot of hours when we had that recent microburst event, and we are just very glad that everybody's safe and everybody did a fantastic job on our operations side of getting our members back on.
So thank you for all you do, and thanks for taking the time to talk with us about this and give us more information so folks can understand all of those moving factors and bits and pieces that go into getting the power back on.
Mike: Absolutely. I'm glad to be here, and thank you for having me.
Andrea: Thanks, Mike. Have a good day.
You've been listening to Live Wire, the official podcast of Kosciusko REMC. To learn more about KREMC, visit our website kremc.com and follow us on social media. Thanks for listening.