Outages & Controlling
We do not control on holidays and weekends!
5-14-12 Outage Report -
7:30pm on 5-14-12
The transmission fault was located between CWEC's Iola tap and the Manawa tap. Farm equipment snagged a down guy wire and broke a pole. The faulted line section was isolated and the Manawa customers were picked up at that time from Harrison.
5-15-12 All power should be restored
November 2011 Snowstorm
November 9thwill long be remembered here at Central Wisconsin Electric Cooperative. Starting early in the morning Mother Nature dropped 6-10 inches of very wet snow throughout our service territory in Waupaca, Marathon, Portage, and Shawano Counties. The heaviest damage appeared to be in the band from Iola up past Tigerton into the Bowler area, but no areas were spared.
The damage started happening around noon on Wednesday as tree limbs started falling all around. But it really wasn’t the trees that caused the damage. We estimate 90% of all the outages were the result of just the heavy snow itself breaking lines, cross-arms, and poles. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if we had not aggressively cleaned out all the trees over hanging the lines the past five years. 3 substations lost power when the transmission lines feeding them were damaged. By 3 pm we had over half of our service territory without power. What seemed like an innocent early season snowfall quickly turned into a disaster?
We had all crews out beginning with the first calls, but we realized this was going to be bigger than we had ever experienced here at CWEC. We quickly called in help from other coops in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Crews from Chippewa Valley Electric Cooperative joined us that night and by Thursday morning we had, in addition to our own 6 crews, crews from Price Electric Cooperative, Oconto Electric Cooperative, and Taylor Electric Cooperative. Friday we called in more crews from Rock Energy Cooperative, Janesville, WI; and Tri-County Electric Cooperative in Rushford MN.
We had 30-40 poles down and over a hundred spans of line down. We concentrated on getting the new poles set and on getting the major 3 phase lines up. Thursday brought more outages as more lines finally gave way after 12 hours of heavy snow sitting on them or melting snow off the lines bounced them up hitting the other lines causing fuses to blow everywhere. By the time Thursday night came we had more outages than we started with Thursday morning even though we were able to set over 20 poles and put up many lines.
Friday we were finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel and by Friday night we had the majority of lines up or at least back-fed from different directions. Saturday we finished up individual outages and the area on Wasrud Road where we had 12 consecutive cross-arms broke spanning a mile and a half. By 7 pm Saturday all were finally back on.
Many thanks go to all those cooperatives that helped us. In all we had 14 different crews on our small system. In an outage this big we start with the first calls but then we quickly analyze the damage and begin a somewhat orderly process of restoring those lines with the most members and working our way down to individual lines and fuses. With the snow and broken poles as well as all the lines down, it may take several hours to restore just one section of line. That long span on Wasrud Road took 4 crews 10 hours alone.
I also want to thank all of our members for their patience. I know many were frustrated with busy signals. It is really a numbers game. When we answer phones here at the cooperative we can answer 4 lines at a time and with 4000 members trying to call, well, that means a lot of busy signals. We also use an after- hours call center which can answer 20 calls at once. We actually had the after-hours center take the calls Thursday because they could get more calls answered then doing it here in the office. The call center took over 2200 phone calls and another 700 got the automated message. Our office could only answer a fraction of that volume, which is why we had the call center take the lines.
We had many weeks of repair even after we got everyone back on because we could back-feed in areas to get members back on and then repair the line later. Again thank you all for your patience. I know it was a difficult time. I certainly hope we never have to experience that mess again. This was truly one of, if not the worst, damage we ever had at one time in our 75 year history.
Pictures from the 2011 first snow storm on 11/9/11
