Meeting with Cherokee County Electric This Morning

Folks,

After four power outages this year we decided it was time to sit down with Cherokee Electric, so this morning I accompanied our board president, Ken Terrell, and vice-president, Pete Galbraith, down to Rusk. We met with Greg Jones and his engineering supervisor, Bart Bauer and talked for about an hour about what can be done to improve the outage situation in our neighborhood. Greg reminded us that we have have a substation much closer to Country Place, in Walnut Grove, so our outages are more localized now. And they revealed that after all the complaints they had during the Phase I operation they had gone into “reactive” mode with regard to our neighborhood, only coming out when there was an outage. But since Phase II and Phase III are now approaching their life expectancy of thirty years, they agreed it’s time for us to pick up where we left off with the replacement of cables. Therefore, next spring they will start Phase II. Phase I was 60% of the work, so these next two phases should be much faster, hopefully only 2-3 months each if the weather will cooperate. We have agreed as your board to keep the residents informed about what to expect and to field complaints so that Cherokee and their subcontractors can get on about their business.

No doubt about it, this project will not be simple. Their cable has to be buried 48″ deep. The Southern Utilities pipes, Verizon cable and Suddenlink wires are all on top of Cherokee’s, so they will be digging through a bird’s nest to get down where they need to be. Some areas can be bored (less lawn and landscape damage), but some will have to be trenched. And those are just the first steps. Then the new lines have to be pulled and reburied and they have to change out transformers and terminate them. Then comes landscape remediation. Finally, a couple of months later Bart will do the final inspection to see if any of the trenching needs to be filled in again (after some rains have made it settle).

We will all need to be patient during this process and try to remember that after these new lines are pulled we will experience far fewer outages. As an example while those of us on Oak Meadow (old lines) have endured four outages, the folks on Big Timber have only experienced ONE (and that was because a substation elsewhere was out).

If any of you have ideas on how we can make this process less painful for our neighborhood, we’d like to hear them. We are looking forward to new lines and fewer outages in our neighborhood.