It was definitely a bad storm, but my experience with the Ice Storm in 1996 was worse. I think this was comparable to 2015. My crew was 1 of 16 working to restore power. Initially, all the crews worked for 24 hours straight. Then we moved to 16 hours on, 8 hours off with the majority of crews working during daylight hours, which is safer and more productive. We still had some crews available during the night for emergencies. Various KEC employees brought us meals so we didn’t have to leave the job site to eat.
Tell us about some of the challenges crews faced when restoring power during the windstorm outages.
The biggest challenge was in the first several hours of the storm when the wind was still blowing. It’s difficult to make progress when trees are still coming down as we are working. In some cases, we had to cut our way into roads and then cut our way out. Members were also unable to access the roads or get out of their neighborhoods. Early in the storm, we had to focus on cutting trees, de-energizing lines, and making it safe for emergency crews to access areas. The safety of the crew and the public is the most important.