The first outage from Hurricane Dorian occurred Wednesday night. High winds battered our entire service territory for an entire day leaving behind over 40 broken poles, countless spans of broken wire and over 50,000 members without power. After the winds passed, our major storm plan went into action and over the course of two days hundreds of additional personnel from contractors and sister cooperatives poured into our service territory. Over 20,000 outages were restored the first night and crews made steady progress over the next several days. Large amounts of debris and fallen trees damaged equipment and made parts of our service territory inaccessible without first having to cut our way into them. Every single employee of the cooperative supported the over 400 field personnel as they restored outages around the clock for five days until the last storm-related outage was cleared early Monday afternoon (9/9/19). 

We would like to thank our members for their patience and understanding and would like to send a special thanks to all of our employees, contractors and sister cooperatives for coming together in a show of cooperative spirit to provide our members with the safe, reliable energy they depend on. Thank you once again to: Sumter Utilities Inc., Xylem Tree Experts, Asplundh Tree Experts, Lewis Tree Service, Kendall Vegetation Services, Woodruff Electric Cooperative Corporation, C&L Electric Cooperative Corp., South Central Electric Association, First Electric Cooperative, Aiken Electric Cooperative, Fairfield Electric Cooperative, Tri-County Electric Cooperative, Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative, Jefferson Energy Cooperative, Excelsior EMC, Planters Electric Membership Corporation, Southwest Arkansas Electric Cooperative, Petit Jean Electric Cooperative and McCall-Thomas Engineering Company.