After a quiet summer, the first week of September was a reminder that we were at the peak of hurricane season. Hurricane Dorian came up the east coast and through our service area on September 5th and 6th, forcing us to close administrative offices early on Thursday, and all day Friday to ensure the safety of our employees and customers.

Crews and staff, including the Call Center and logistics team, went into storm mode on Thursday afternoon, ready to deal with whatever Dorian brought our way.

The first outages were reported when a tree split and fell on power lines along Red Forbes Road. Trouble trucks and a construction crew responded and restored power. Winds picked up through the overnight hours, and outages peaked shortly after 3:30 a.m., leaving about 4,000 customers in the dark. Even the Operations Center lost power, but the backup generators worked as intended to ensure Station 1 and other needed areas could continue to operate as designed.

By 4:10 a.m. Friday, the winds were strong enough that bucket trucks could no longer go up to restore power, but crews continued working as much as they could from ground level. They were able to restore power to more than 2,000 customers without using buckets.

The winds died down around 7:00 a.m., and crews were ready to roll in full operation mode. They made quick work of restoring power to most of the remaining 1,994 outages.  By 6:00 p.m., the last outage was being wrapped up.

Big thanks to all who helped ensure that we were ready to respond and take care of our customers. It takes a whole host of employees to prepare, track, respond, and communicate with our customers during weather events.