Thousands of West Florida Electric Cooperative customers were without power after Hurricane Ivan and the tornadoes it spawned Wednesday and Thursday, Sept. 16 and 17. During the following four days, WFEC’s crews worked 16- to 18-hour days, assisted by service center personnel and other staff, to repair the Co-op’s storm-ravaged electrical distribution system.

WFEC employees had remained on standby until the Co-op began receiving reports of storm-related power outages around 6 p.m. that Wednesday. The crews then mobilized, only briefly suspending their efforts during tornado sightings in the area during the night. Later in the week, linemen from Withlacoochee Electric Cooperative, of Dade City, Fla., and Peace River Electric Cooperative, of Wauchula, Fla., came to assist WFEC’s crews.

By the time WFEC finished restoring electric service to the affected customers, except where the customer’s equipment required repairs, the following Monday afternoon, Sept. 20, the Co-op had processed approximately 15,000 outage reports through its automated response system. Some of these reports were of recurrent outages at the same locations, due to falling debris. Over the course of the power restoration process, the crews replaced more than 25,000 feet of wire, 75 transformers and 100 poles.

The heaviest concentration of outages on WFEC’s system resulted from damage to a power supplier’s transmission lines feeding into the Westville and Pittman substations. This affected approximately 3,600 customers served by those two substations. Among WFEC’s 13 substations, the fewest outages occurred on the one in Malone. Service interruptions throughout WFEC’s service area averaged 31 hours per customer.

Within days of restoring power to WFEC’s customers after Hurricane Ivan, 21 WFEC linemen left for Jay, Fla., Sept. 24 to help a neighboring electric cooperative restore power to its customers. The crews took bucket trucks and pole trailers to assist Escambia River Electric Cooperative, which serves approximately 10,000 customers in northern Santa Rosa and Escambia Counties.
WFEC is a Touchstone Energy® cooperative serving over 25,000 customers in portions of Calhoun, Holmes, Jackson and Washington Counties.

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