REC expects to restore the vast majority of outages related to Thursday’s storm by this evening, although a few outages could persist into Sunday morning.
As of 8:30 a.m., about 700 member-owners remained without power as a result of more than 80 separate damage locations.
Seventeen broken poles remain to be replaced, but REC has the materials, manpower and necessary equipment to make those repairs today.
REC has moved dozens of line workers from its Bowling Green and Culpeper offices to the northwest region of our service territory area to assist in outage restoration. Six mutual aid crews have arrived from Northern Neck, Central Virginia and Choptank electric cooperatives, along with contract crews from Pike Electric and C.W. Wright Construction. When added with the Blue Ridge office field teams, more than 100 field workers are now working to restore all outages as quickly and safely as they can.
In the early stages of restoration, crews battled ice as thick as three-quarters of an inch, some of it falling in the rights-of way where linemen were working. While most of the ice is now off the trees, some branches remain ice-covered and continue to fall in the rights-of-way.
In addition, some remote damage sites are not reachable by regular trucks, so crews are having to manually carry heavy tools and equipment needed to make repairs. Crews are using specialized equipment such as a track machine to reach some damage sites.
Please continue to check REC’s outage map for additional information on estimated times of restoration as those details become available.
