At this time no one could really understand the devastating amount of damage to our system, and how long the repairs would take to make. Every outage is handled the same way, and with the same urgency. Phone calls are placed, employees are contacted and system repairs usually correct the problem quickly, but this storm would prove to be a very different experience for those of us new to the cooperative world. Many employees had already put in an entire day worth of work when customers throughout our territory started calling. Once we had committed crews to work on re-routing power around dangerously damaged lines, we realized the system had no power.
Transmission lines bring power from the power plants across long stretches of land.
The lines are carried on huge towers covering thousands of miles of countryside. Power is then brought to smaller distribution systems, like United Power's, on the small poles, lines and underground lines most people have in their neighborhoods. This morning our biggest problems involved our transmission lines. There was simply no power being fed into our system. The transmission lines feeding United Power's system from power plants hundreds of miles away were quiet.