Storms & Outages

The storm has passed and you're still sitting in the dark. To make matters worse, you can see a downed line, which you reported to the electric co-op. Why haven't they fixed it yet?

Sound familiar? Hopefully not, but it's no secret that thunderstorms, tornadoes and ice storms - and we’ve had our share the last several years - create havoc for electric cooperatives. Power outages tend to occur during severe weather.

Restoring power after a major outage is a big and complicated job - one that involves more than simply throwing a switch.

When outages occur, our main goal is to restore power safely to the greatest number of members in the shortest time possible. Repair crews determine where the damage is by starting at the substations. Each substation serves several thousand members and a problem here could be caused by failure in the transmission system. If the problem can be corrected here, power may be restored to a large number of people quickly.

From the substation, linemen work their way down the distribution lines, restoring service to the main feeder lines, then lines serving groups of homes and finally, individual members. Fixing problems at single accounts solves nothing if the main line is dead. No electricity would flow into the house and, as a result, many other members would be without power longer.

Sometimes damage occurs on the service line between your house and the transformer on a nearby pole. This could explain why you don't have power when your neighbors do. Members are responsible for damage to the service installation past the metering point. We cannot fix this; you are responsible for these repairs.

Individual households that may receive special attention are homes where loss of electricity affects life support. If someone in your home depends on life support, call us before an emergency arises so we can flag your account accordingly.

Report all outages to our office at (405) 321-2024. Dispatchers are available 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year. We use every available phone line to receive calls during large outages but it may take a couple of tries to get through. A major outage can affect thousands of other members.