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.
Restoration Process
1. Keeping the public safe is top priority. Crews will first clear fallen lines from the roadways.
2. Once roadways have been cleared, work begins on restoring power to substations, if necessary. Sometimes service to hundreds of members can be restored immediately by restoring power at the substation.
3. Next, major distribution feeders are repaired. These are the lines that come from the substation. If energy isn’t flowing over these lines, your home cannot receive power.
4. Tap lines are repaired next. These lines carry power to groups of homes from distribution feeders. Sometimes taps need to be disconnected to get the main lines back on.
5. Finally, individual service lines are repaired. While MEC is responsible for getting the electricity to your meter, members must contact an electrician to repair damage to member-owned electric equipment.
Power Restoration FAQ
A: 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.
A: 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.
A: 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.
A: 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.
A: 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.