Be Prepared for (Another) Perfect storm

By
Doug Wilson
Assistant Manager

Last March, a storm cell traveled across the Eastern United States from Alabama through North Carolina with impeccable timing. Preceded by days of rain and followed by a freezing temperatures, the storm cell produced large accumulations of snow and ice.
Much of that snow and ice collected on wet trees like a magnet, causing them to bend, break and even uproot onto our power lines. After the storm passed, the Broad River system was left with 40 % of its membership without power. The first light of day revealed twenty downed poles and thousands of feet of wire on the ground across Cherokee, Spartanburg and Union Counties.
Broad River crews, with assistance from other state cooperatives and contract crews, worked throughout the night restoring power. An outage that could have lasted five days was completed in seventy-two hours because of the efforts and hard work of a dedicated work force that was prepared to leave their homes and family, which in some cases were without power, to restore a crippled system back to normality.
As we enter into the winter season, it is impossible to dismiss the potential of another storm like the one experienced last year, or even worse. Broad River will again be prepared to handle any such storms, but there are ways you can help as well. The information gathered during an outage is critical to our restoration efforts and can be easily analyzed to improve response times: