Vol. 68 Number 5


News orthwestern Electric March 2017 January ice storm cripples NWEC’s system O


n Monday, Jan. 9, weather forecasters began issuing watches and warnings for a crippling ice storm that would start impacting Okla- homa as early as Jan. 13. To prepare for the storm, we ordered extra materials, made a work schedule and paid our contract crews standby wages so they wouldn’t leave and go to another area hit by the ice storm.


Friday the 13th turned out to be somewhat un-


eventful. We hoped the weather forecasters had been wrong, but unfortunately they had accurately predict- ed the devastating storm. They were just a day late. The following is a day by day account of what happened before, during and after the storm hit. 01/13/17 – Day 1 It rained off and on throughout the day. The news kept warning us about the possibility of crippling damage in our service territory. Some schools and organizations cancelled activities. 01/14/17 – Day 2


01/16/17 – Day 4


Rain fell early and ice began to form, but we had very few reported outages. By afternoon, we estimated we had only lost around 10 poles. During the night, the tempera- tures dropped below freezing and it started to rain again. 01/15/17 – Day 3


Ice began to grow in size as it accumulated on every- thing but the roads. By late evening, over 80% of our meters had lost power. We have just a little over 11,500 connected meters and over 9,700 meters were not receiving power. The linemen worked all day and we began add- ing to the number of linemen and tree crews by bringing in additional help. The linemen made very little progress. Each time they would fix a section of line or replace a pole, another section of line or other poles would break right behind them. Most of the guys had been working for about 18-24 hours straight in the freezing rain. We estimated we had lost roughly 300-500 poles (which would be a lot for any other storm). We made a decision that night to bring the linemen in to rest and try again the next day once the rain and ice had hopefully stopped. To make matters worse, we lost power to our office in


Woodward and were running on generators. At 12:30 a.m., our backup generator failed and shut down all our servers. These servers are responsible for running our accounting software, outage management software and even controls the locks on our doors. It took our IT department over 12 hours to get everything back up and running properly.


WFEC had eight substations down. By the end of the


day, we had over 160 linemen out in the field and we were now estimating we had lost between 1,000 to 1,200 poles (18-20 poles per mile which is equal to 50-70 miles). 01/17/17 – Day 5 The ice had melted and WFEC was close to energizing all of the substations except Arnett. By noon, the number of meters without power dropped below 9,000. We contin- ued to add to our workforce. By the end of the day, we had close to 250 linemen working for us. We added additional warehousemen to help with all the materials coming in and going back out. We also had to hire professional caterers to handle all the meals for the linemen. 1/18/17 – Day 6


The outage number started at 8,145. The linemen re- stored service to 1,350 meters and by 7 p.m., the number without power was down to 6,795. We continued to bring in additional help, and by the end of the day we had close to 350 linemen working for us. This is also the day our au- ditors from Lubbock, Tex., arrived at the office to complete our annual audit. 01/19/17 Day 7 We started the morning with 6,258 meters without power and by 9 p.m. we were down to 4,805. This was the first time since day three that over 50% of our members were receiving power. We were also feeding and housing over Continued on page 3.


Inside


Election Results............2 Save the date ................2 Ice storm........................3 New rates.......................4


The January ice storm resulted in downed power lines and mangled equipment all across NWEC’s service territory.


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