Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electra Cooperative. The Buzz is a monthly message to our community celebrating what it means to be a member owner of your local electric cooperative, Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op, our community.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Welcome back to the Buzz, Zachary. I'm Zach Smith, communications specialist here at Boone Electric Cooperative. And today we're joined in the studio by Boone Electric's manager of operations, Jimmy Goodnight.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Hello.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: And Boone Electric's manager of engineering, Andrew Petrie.
[00:00:40] Speaker D: Hello there.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: Thank you guys for joining the program today.
[00:00:42] Speaker D: Thanks for having us on.
[00:00:44] Speaker C: March typically signifies the start of storm season here in Missouri as far as thunderstorms go. And of course, stranger things have happened than a late winter snowstorm here in the Midwest. So today we're talking a little bit about the weather, a lot about how we as a cooperative restore power and sharing a few tips on how people can be prepared for severe weather at home. So one of the questions that I know we receive from the media all the time, anytime there's potential weather in the forecast is what are you doing to prepare for it? And I suppose like any one of us in our normal lives, that starts with watching the forecast, right, Andrew?
[00:01:20] Speaker D: You betcha, you betcha. And there's certainly a lot of that that goes on here.
[00:01:24] Speaker C: I know in those morning safety meetings you always make sure to let both the folks are out in the field and the employees are up front, people working dispatch know, you know, wind, snow, whatever's in the forecast. It's just a heads up that we could potentially have an outage. And I think that the first round of weather that we had, the beginning of this year was projected to look a lot worse than it ended up being for our co op members. And we came out of it with just one relatively small outage. But we never know for sure that we're going to have an outage or how big it's going to be or how many people it's going to affect until we have one. Right?
[00:01:56] Speaker D: Yeah, there's a lot of variables that really go into that. Whether or not it's a heavy wet snow or there's going to be a lot of wind that goes along with it. There's just a lot of details that can impact our system a little differently.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: And a lot of the preparation part is done before there's ever a forecast. It's really through the regular maintenance of the system through the right of way program, correct?
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Yes. We spend 12 months out of the year preparing for the worst events. We get a lot of the smaller events, but all of Our preparations that we do are all geared towards major events, big storms, big events that we might have. Whether it comes to maintenance on the system, right of way program, our line maintenance, repairing components on the system and our dispatch, our response to storm events, we spend a ton of time making sure that we're prepared for those large events.
[00:02:52] Speaker C: That's another good point. We always have folks on call, right? That's whether we're expecting extreme weather or not. 24, 7, 365 as they say.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Correct. We have people always on call. We have crews that are standing by waiting for something to happen every minute of every day of the year.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: What is the general on call situation like? How many crews? You know? That's one. I get a lot. How many crews are standing by?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: That's a great question. We always have one crew that is our trouble crew that we call and they're on from Wednesday to Wednesday along with the dispatcher and they handle all of the hundreds of smaller outages throughout the year. It could happen in the middle of the night, it could happen on a blue sky day, it could happen in a storm. But that particular crew watches over the system all the time.
In addition to that, we have 25 linemen and we have multiple other support personnel that we can draw on to make up additional crews in the event of a storm. So we start with one crew.
As Andrew said, we're always watching the weather. We also watch everybody else's outages, whether it be co ops, whether it be IOUs or municipals. We want to know who else or what's going on in other parts of the country or the state as far as outages. Because it, it's an indicator of what we're going to get, generally speaking, so we can ramp our crews up.
Anytime we have a major event, we start adding crews depending on the number of outages, depending, depending on the number of members that those outages affect, how severe the weather is. We definitely want to have as short a response time as we can, especially when we have extreme weather, bitter cold, excessive heat. We'll add crews to respond as fast as we can depending on any of the variables that we have in addition to our crews. The good thing about the co ops is we have a really strong mutual aid agreement.
So I feel, I think all the co ops feel that we kind of have, I'm not going to say unlimited, but almost unlimited supply of crews, men and trucks and equipment and resources to come help us in the event we have a major event and we draw up on those as Often as we need. And other co ops draw on our resources as much as they need. So it's a great cooperative effort and it really gives us an insurance policy that no matter how bad it gets, we're going to be able to put enough people on to get it back on. So it's a really good process that we use more than people see.
[00:05:47] Speaker C: And you mentioned some of the variables, of course, when the power does go out, the first thing that people want to know, and understandably so, especially in extreme temperatures, whether it's hot or cold, they always want to know, well, when is my power going to be back on? So when is the power going to be back on, guys?
[00:06:04] Speaker D: Well, it's never quite as quickly as we'd like for it to be, sure. But we can assure you, as Jimmy just talked to anytime that something happens, we've got folks that are always on call, we've got folks that are always watching the system. And our guys and gals, everyone, they really work as quickly and as safely as they can to get things back on.
Sometimes you've got a small quick outage that they can get out there, it's close by, you know, where they're stationed out of. They can get to it pretty quick, get things back on. You know, sometimes you can get, you know, response times during the day of, you know, 15, 20 minutes, half hour, if all the stars align. And there's other times when, you know, they're stationed on the south side of the county and there's an outage on the north side of the county and takes a little travel time to get there, takes a little travel time to figure out exactly where the issue's at. And you may end up with, you know, some more of the complex outages, may end up lasting a couple hours. And so it really just depends. But on average, you know, our indices, you know, we do a lot of tracking of outages and how long does it take to do this and how long is the average member out?
The average across the entire system across the entire year usually ends up being a little bit, a little bit less than an hour.
[00:07:13] Speaker C: Well, that's. That seems good. I don't know what the relative comparison is, but that doesn't seem terrible.
[00:07:19] Speaker D: So one of the things that we do with tracking our outages and our indices is one of the things that we like to look at is we contribute to NRECA's reliability indices study program essentially is what it is. And we routinely fall in top quartile as far as performance goes across the nation, across Various cooperatives, various sizes, various locations. So we tend to hang our hat and say, hey, you know, we feel like what we're doing is good. You know, there's obviously always room for improvement. And, you know, Jimmy and I are constantly looking at the system as, you know, what we can do to improve on response times, improve on performance of the system protection.
There's just a lot that goes into it ahead of time before that power ever actually goes out.
[00:08:06] Speaker C: Sure. Well, and like you were talking about the different variables or conditions. I mean, the outage itself may be a simple fix, but getting to it might be the issue. And all that, of course, depends on the effects of the weather storm, whatever it is that knocks it out, you bet.
[00:08:21] Speaker D: And even with that, you know, if there's multiple outages that are staged or that are going on concurrently, that can also create some complexities to the response time for the crews. So if we've got, you know, two different outages going on, we've got, you know, one crew running at 2:00 in the morning. There may a little, there may be a little bit of delay, but rest assured, the minute that they leave that first outage, they're heading straight to that second outage.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Is there sort of a system, or I should say a rough system for how you guys prioritize what can be turned on or what, what you can get to the guys in the field can get to quickest or first or, you know, if it's, if it's one thing at a sub, for instance, that can get every, you know, everybody who's on that particular outage back on. That seems like something that you would try to get the most people back on first. But of course, again, variables, I'm sure.
[00:09:13] Speaker D: Absolutely, yeah, that's, that is the whole.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Name of the game is getting the most people on in the shortest time that we can. So we do prioritize.
Every event's different, depending on how, where it hits, whether it affects large feeders and large poles, large conductors, or a lot of small outages.
You know, we look at how many different places do they have to Visit. Whether it's 25 outages, that's a single member each. Whether it's 10 outages, you know, with 100 on each, we always are looking at prior prioritizing those. So we're not going to send a crew from here across the county to get five meters on if we can get four right here. So we always weigh, and it's always a judgment call to weigh the geography and the number of People you're trying to get on, plus adding crews. You know, when do you add a crew to make sure that the other side of the county's outage time is short as well? So even on a normal day with a few outages, we will add crews to make sure that that outage time is reasonable in our minds. So. But we do always prioritize. If we can get the substation on and get 500 members on, that's what we're going to work on first.
Depending on the extent of damage. If that damage is going to take a long time to fix, like several poles, we'll. We'll put construction crews on that, but then we'll also have crews to go pick up other outages that we can get on in a timelier manner.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: Of course, a lot of it, like you guys have both said, goes into preparing for things ahead of time. Is there anything that people need to remember about outages in terms of things that they can do ahead of time to prepare for them, or maybe more importantly, things that they shouldn't do if they do have an outage before we're able to get there and work on it?
[00:11:07] Speaker D: The first thing I would say is don't keep opening your fridge just to see if it's still cold. That would be my first comment.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: That's a good one. Downed power lines is always a big subject. It's very important that if you see wire down that you report it and don't go near it. Those downed wire calls to us immediately could go to the top of the list. If we know there's wire down somewhere and somebody reports that, that's something we're going to go take care of because of the safety factor involved with that. Now, our system is constructed in that when a wire goes down, it should.
[00:11:46] Speaker D: Should de energize us.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: That's never a guarantee, so we never count on that as our silver bullet. We always say, do not approach a down power line.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: We hear it a lot in the classrooms when the education specialists are going around teaching the kids about electricity. But it bears repeating and reminder for those of us who haven't heard it in 20 or 30 years. Electricity is invisible. So if the down line is down, that doesn't necessarily mean that the power is off.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: So that is. That's correct. And even our linemen who are highly qualified, trained to work around live conductor, they have to take special precautions to approach those and to make sure that that line is de energized to work. We definitely do not want them. The members in that situation, the one.
[00:12:36] Speaker C: That we tend to hit on a lot, especially in the winter. But really, again, any time of year, of course, is, you know, trying to, if you don't have to, if there's not an emergency and you don't need to be on the roads or traveling, don't do and try to help the first responders. Utility workers do their job that way by not being a potential obstruction or another, another emergency that they have to handle. And of course, the technology and meters is such these days that most times we know that folks are out of power before they do. But if you do need to report an outage, you can do that anytime through our Smart Hub app if you're using that. Or you can call 573-449-4181 or our 1-800-225-8143 anytime, day or night. You can also check our outage map anytime on boonelectric Co Op.
[00:13:22] Speaker D: The only thing that I might add, if and when they called to report outages, the more information they can give us did they hear something? Did they see something? It's great to, you know, report things via the app, but the more information they can give us if they saw something that helps, that goes a long way in us getting the crew to the right place at the right time to, to try and help get their power back on.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Forewarned is forearmed and the more knowledge they have going into the situation, the better for them and probably the quicker they can get it back on if they have some idea of what happened.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah, we do key on that a lot. Somebody says, hey, I heard a boom. That's automatically we're like, okay, where's this person at? Because that'll it just makes it quicker for us to respond.
[00:14:07] Speaker C: I know outages are the last things that we want the member staff to deal with, but thank you guys for joining us to talk about it today. It's unfortunately just going to be that time of year where we start thinking about it a lot with the weather changing like it does in the spring. Thank you guys for joining. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us and thank you for joining the Buzz. Be sure to join us again next month and until then, we'll see you somewhere down the line.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Thank you for tuning in to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electric Cooperative. To subscribe or for more information, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram X and LinkedIn. And of course you can always visit us 24, 7@BooElectric Co op. Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op our community.
