Spring brings songbirds, flowers, and an elevated risk of severe weather to our area. Preparation and attention to the forecast are two key factors in staying safe during and after a storm.
Step One: Prepare
- Get a weather radio and program it to your location. Meteorologists recommend have a minimum of two reliable ways to receive storm alerts and warnings, including when the power is out.
- Choose a spot to shelter in place or evacuate to during a storm.
- The safest place in your house will be a windowless interior room on the lowest level.
- Cars, mobile homes, RVs and other vehicles without foundations are not safe during the strongest severe storms.
- Contact your local EMA office for an up-to-date list of storm shelters in your area.
- Talk to your elderly friends and family about their plan to shelter or evacuate.
- Don’t forget about medical needs. Plan for alternative sources of power, backup supplies and oxygen tanks, or to evacuate to a home or facility with power.
- The safest place in your house will be a windowless interior room on the lowest level.
- Build a kit of emergency supplies for use during the storm and during long outages following the storm.
- Include a minimum of a three-day supply of all needed equipment.
- Set aside a gallon of water per person per day.
- Include shelf-stable food that can be eaten without cooking.
- Add any medicines needed and a first aid kit.
- Stock a flashlight, weather radio, batteries, power banks, and charging cables.
- Include a change of clothing and tarps, bungee cords, etc.
- Get more recommendations from Ready.gov.
Step Two: Monitor
- Keep an eye on the weather forecast and remember the difference between watches and alerts:
- Severe Thunderstorm Watch: Conditions are favorable for a powerful thunderstorm during the timeframe of the alert. It is important to keep your weather radio or phone alerts on and to monitor the forecast.
- Severe Thunderstorm Warning: A strong or severe thunderstorm is actively moving into your area. Consider taking shelter.
- Tornado Watch: Conditions are favorable for tornadoes or storm circulation during the timeframe of the alert. Monitor the weather and keep your weather radios and alerts on.
- Tornado Warning: Circulation has been detected, or an actual tornado has been spotted in your area. Take shelter immediately.
- Wind Advisory: High straight line wind gusts and damage from wind is possible during the time frame of the alert.
- High Wind Warning: Dangerous straight-line wind gusts and damaging sustained winds are likely. Monitor the weather and consider taking shelter.
- Expect power outages, possibly widespread, in any of these scenarios.
- Always seek shelter immediately if you hear sirens during a storm.
Step Three: Recover
- In the event of a fire or medical emergency, call 911.
- Wait for weather warnings to expire or for an all-clear to be given before leaving your shelter.
- EVEN IF YOUR POWER IS OUT, assume all lines are energized. Stay far away from downed lines or from trees, limbs, and other debris touching the lines. You can report downed lines to NGEMC by sending us a message.
- Keep safety first and remember to reach out to loved ones and neighbors following a storm.
- Report outages by logging in to your account online, with the My NGEMC Account app or by using our automated phone lines.
- Monitor restoration progress with our live outage map.
How your power is restored
NGEMC’s system includes many circuits of electricity fed by multiple substations throughout our service area.
- When storms cause widespread outages, we send out as many crews as we can, sometimes calling in crews from out of town if restoration is expected to take more than one day.
- While we know where an outage is and how many people it affects, we don’t usually know the cause of the outage or how long it will take to restore until our line workers can arrive on the scene and inspect the lines and equipment.
Because the electricity flows from the substation out down the circuit, there is an order to how most restorations take place.
- When a substation breaker opens, it’s usually because a fault was detected somewhere on the circuit. Finding the fault and isolating the damage is the first step.
- Substation breaker outages normally impact 800 to 1,500 people at a time. Resetting the breaker usually restores a large portion of the members impacted.
- Before resetting the breaker, the crew must ride out and inspect the miles of line along the circuit to determine what caused the breaker to open. This usually takes a little time before they can “flip the switch” to restore power back at the substation.
- Larger pockets of members are usually restored next, depending on the scope of the damage. Occasionally after these larger outages are restored, we are alerted to other pockets of members impacted by more damage even further away from the substation.
- So, a member may see that there is a limb on the service line of their house and wonder why they haven’t seen a service truck yet. What they don’t see is that an entire substation circuit breaker tripped due to a downed pole at the entrance to their neighborhood. Even if a crew had stopped by to remove the limb, they still would not have had power due to the damage between their home and the substation.
- A storm can produce hundreds of outages across our service area, most of which impact only one or two households. In these cases, the sheer volume of outages vs. the number of crews means the time for restoration may be extended.
Exceptions to this order:
- Once a crew is on the scene, safety is the most important factor.
- Sometimes proximity is another factor. If the crew finishes one outage in an area, they may be assigned to several nearby.
- In the case of extensive damage, the first crew on the scene may have to turn the outage over to one with heavier equipment or even wait for road crews to clear the way into an area before they can safely restore power.
- Extensive damage may include broken poles, spans of downed line, large trees on the lines, and other similar cases.
- Many people with medical needs requiring power, the elderly, families with children, and other vulnerable populations live throughout our service area and are frequently impacted when widespread outages occur.
- Because electricity is essential to so many across our communities and because of how the electric circuit works (as described above), we cannot guarantee anyone will be turned on quickly during a widespread outage situation.
- This goes for outages of all sizes, as there are so many environmental factors at play in a storm scenario.
- It is always necessary to have backup equipment, a secondary source of power, or a plan to evacuate to a facility with power.
- Because electricity is essential to so many across our communities and because of how the electric circuit works (as described above), we cannot guarantee anyone will be turned on quickly during a widespread outage situation.
