Over the last several months, our staff and consulting engineers have been studying ways to improve and harden the poles and lines the Cooperative relies on every day to provide your electrical service in the safest, most reliable way possible. These improvements will take several years to fully complete. At the same time, I also recognize some members can experience frequent or repeated outages that are nothing short of annoying.
This month, I’d like to discuss our newly formed Reliability Strike Team and what that will mean for you, our members. Claiborne has invested in a technologically advanced outage management system that detects outages and helps our linemen when restoring service by predicting where the cause of the outage might be located. That system also allows our staff to look for trends in recent outages and identify those locations where outage frequency is unacceptably high.
Quarterly our Distribution Design group will be mapping locations with more than seven non-storm-related outages in the last 24 months. Those locations will then be passed along to our Area Service Linemen who will patrol those troublesome lines looking for potential causes and making any minor repairs needed. If larger, more extensive repairs or right-of-way maintenance are required, that information will be passed along to our District Operations group to develop and implement a plan of action.
I am excited about the synergies of our Design and Operations group teaming together to work towards one common goal…improving your overall member experience.
Michael Marcotte
Claiborne Electric General Manager & CEO