Electric Co-op Today

Utility workers, including thousands of electric cooperative lineworkers and construction personnel, have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to help restore power well beyond their local service territories this year.

A co-op crew works to repair a section of damaged line following a February ice storm in the Shelbyville, Ill., area. (Photo By: Shelby Electric Cooperative)

“We’ve had some record-breaking recovery actions,” said William Bryan, deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure security and energy restoration for the U.S. Department of Energy.

“2011 has had its share of incidents,” Bryan told the annual conference of the National Association of State Energy Officials, in Washington, D.C., Oct.12. “We’ve been hit with some really major weather events.”

A spate of natural disasters began with massive winter storms in February, followed by flooding that kept skilled technicians away from home for weeks.

“We’ve had 100-year floods down the Mississippi River affecting states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee,” Bryan said, noting that pipelines and ports were shut down in some areas. “Flooding along the Missouri River resulted in the terminal closure at one of our ethanol plants.”

An active tornado season caused widespread problems in parts of the South and Midwest, Bryan said. “This was probably one of the worst in history. In Missouri alone, there were 300 tornadoes.”

Besides local distribution power outages, some of those storms damaged transmission infrastructure and caused cracks in natural gas pipelines, prompting precautionary evacuations.

“There have also been a record-breaking amount of wildfires,” Bryan said. “In May we had 30 wildfires impacting gas and oil production.”

Co-op lineworkers repair distribution lines in Maryland following Hurricane Irene. (Photo By: SMECO)

Hurricane season has been the dessert, Bryan said. “We’ve had 17 named storms to date, four of them resulted in hurricanes and one of them made landfall.”

Hurricane Irene prompted emergency declarations for 13 states and the District of Columbia. The category one storm made landfall at North Carolina Aug. 27, before causing widespread flooding and wind damage along the Eastern Seaboard.

“We had 5 million people without electricity at some point,” Bryan said. “We had 30,000 mutual assistance personnel roll into the East Coast from other states.”

Hurricane Irene was followed by widespread flooding from Tropical Storm Lee, adding to restoration challenges in the same region.

Bryan’s DOE unit oversees federal coordination of efforts designed to maintain and restore energy supply reliability following natural or man-made disruptions, including weather events, atmospheric disturbances, acts of terrorism and other deliberate disruptions.

“Industry is often overlooked in the picture, but they are actually the key player,” Bryan said. “They are the ones that are going to tell us how systems are going to be impacted by these things.”

Tags: Department of Energy, Lineworkers, Power Outages, Recovery