- Cause of outages: Trees are down and poles are broken.
- Transmission lines: all are operational
- Substations: all are operational
- Status of feeders: one feeder is locked out at the Ryceville substation.
At 5 p.m. on October 29, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) had approximately 3,790 customers without power, and had 116 incidents. An incident is a damage event which can range from a blown transformer to a tree on a line or a broken pole. All transmission lines and substations are operational. Earlier today several distribution feeders were out of service, but crews made repairs and power was restored with minimal disruption to customers.
The most heavily affected areas are St. Mary’s County with 2,100 customers without power and Calvert County with 950 outages. Approximately 645 customers in Charles County and 95 in Prince George’s County are without power.
SMECO has its own linemen, contract linemen, and cooperative linemen, along with tree crews for a total of about 550 field workers ready to restore electric service to affected areas. SMECO also has additional employees to assist its fully-staffed Contact Center with handling outage calls.
“We have assembled a historic workforce to respond to what we are anticipating will be a historic storm,” said Austin J. Slater, Jr., SMECO president and CEO. “We are expecting significant damage to our system, and we urge our customer-members to take the necessary precautions to prepare for an extended outage restoration period.”
SMECO’s outage restoration policy is to make repairs that will restore service to the most people in the least amount of time. Transmission lines and substations are repaired first, followed by distribution lines that feed neighborhoods. Tap lines and individual service lines are then repaired to restore power to customers who may still be without electricity.
–>
