MEC’s main goal is to keep your lights on. When an outage occurs, crews and staff work hard to restore your power safely and quickly.
Restoring Your Power
During a widespread outage, crews first remove threats to public safety, such as power lines on the roads. Then they work through the system, making repairs that will restore the most co-op members first.
- Transmission: High-voltage transmission lines and substations, which supply bulk power to local co-op distribution substations, must be repaired before other parts of the system can operate.
- Substations: Next co-op crews repair distribution substations, which supply power to hundreds or thousands of co-op members.
- Main lines: These are the lines leaving the co-op distribution substations. They carry power to large groups of members, such as communities or housing developments. If energy isn’t flowing over these lines, your home cannot receive power.
- Tap lines: These lines branch off from the main lines. They deliver power to transformers (either mounted on poles or on pads for underground service) outside businesses, schools, and homes. These lines carry power to groups of homes from distribution feeders. Sometimes taps need to be disconnected to get the main lines back on.
- Individual homes: Finally, crews make repairs to individual service connections affecting a single member. While MEC is responsible for getting the electricity to your meter, members must contact an electrician to repair damage to member-owned electric equipment. (including your meter base and weatherhead).
Power Restoration FAQs
The crew you saw was probably working on getting the backbone of MEC’s electric system repaired. Our first priority in an outage is to get the main power lines back in operation. Not every wire is a main circuit. There are thousands of lines that feed off main circuits (called tap lines). So after the main power lines are energized, we start repairing tap lines next.
After trunk lines are functioning, we make repairs that affect the most people at one time. This means repairs affecting only one or two locations will probably be last.
There may be damage to the service wires leading only to your home, and those wires may not affect your neighbor’s electricity. Your neighbor’s home may be served by a different feed (or different wire) than your home, even though you’re right next door.
Even though the wires to your home are buried, overhead wires may bring electricity to those underground wires from the substation. Power can still be interrupted by other circumstances such as storms, construction, automobile accidents, and animal contacts.
Not always. It is very important for members to call us when they experience an outage, which helps us identify the location and extent of the outage.
MEC isn’t necessarily able to restore service to the Outage Priority locations first. We must repair the damage to the backbone of the electric system before turning our attention to individual priority accounts.
Members who depend on electrical equipment for a medical necessity should always have alternate plans in place in case the power goes out for an extended period of time. This may include a backup power source, extra medical supplies, or an alternate location until the power is restored.