Electric Co-op Today

The mission taxed men and machines for weeks, but the mandate made the reasons clear: “We can never quit until the last consumer-member at the end of our lines has power back on in their homes,” said Jerry Reisenauer, general manager and CEO of Grand Electric Cooperative.

Troops from the South Dakota National Guard use one of their tracked vehicles to tow a co-op line truck through deep snow. (Photo By: South Dakota National Guard)

The Bison, S.D.-based co-op, along with other electric co-ops in the region, recently spent three weeks work restoring electricity after a series of January storms snapped poles, pulled down power lines and left thousands of rural consumer-members in the dark.

“In some instances, we had to repair a number of wire breaks and replace over 80 poles in a ten or twelve mile long stretch to restore service to a member, ” said Reisenauer. “We’ve had crews out on snow machines trying to locate breaks, and we’ve had to send tracked vehicles out to make the repairs.”

On many days, hurricane- force winds continued to rip up co-op distribution systems even as they worked 12-hour days to complete basic repairs.  Crews alternately faced blizzard conditions and ice storms.

South Dakota co-ops’ first outages were reported on Jan. 20; they restored service to their last residential connections on Feb. 10, said Brenda Kleinjan, the South Dakota Rural Electric Association’s director of communications and member relations. “In some cases,” she added, “co-ops had to set 50 poles or more to get a single member back on line.”

The South Dakota National Guard deployed heavy equipment to help clear snow for line crews and haul materials to areas where broken poles and downed power lines were not reachable from roads.

Similar challenges were faced by co-op crews in parts of Iowa and North Dakota.

Tags: Power Outages, Recovery, Weather