If an outage occurs after hours on a ‘blue sky’ day, SEC’s system operators must spring into action and notify on-call line personnel. These on-call line personnel must get the information, get ready, and drive to the outage locations. Once onsite, the line technician looks for the problem. When the problem is found, line personnel work to restore power safely.
As mentioned earlier, the safety of our personnel is paramount. Safe restoration of electricity requires line personnel to take steps to protect themselves when restoring power. Each step in the process, from the member calling to report the outage to the moment power is restored, takes time. In major outage situations, we can have hundreds of outage locations to visit, exacerbating the estimated time to restore power systemwide.