8 Things You Might Not Know About Power Restoration

September 1, 2024

When your power goes out, it generally takes more than the flip of a switch to get it back on. It is a concerted effort on our part that takes time and hard work from the entire Wells Rural Electric Company (WREC) team.

This month, we’d like to pull the curtain back and shed light on our restoration process. While you may only see the line crews working in your neighborhood, behind the scenes there’s a lot more going on.

Here are 8 things you might not know about power restoration:

  1. Your help matters. The sooner we know your power is out, the sooner we can get crews on the scene to begin the restoration process.
  2. It’s a team effort. Communicators keep everyone informed of progress or potential dangers. When your power goes out, we all work together as quickly and safely as possible to restore it.
  3. Every outage is different. Until our team can assess the situation, we don’t know how dangerous it is or what equipment will be needed to repair the system and restore power.
  4. Problems are prioritized. Crews focus first on responding to public safety issues and critical services. Then we prioritize work that impacts the largest number of people.
  5. Our employees face many dangers. Besides working around high-voltage electricity, our crews are on alert for wild animals, weather elements, falling trees, and fast-moving cars.
  6. Let those lights flicker. Many people believe flickering lights mean an outage is imminent or there is a problem with the system. Actually it is just the opposite. It indicates our system works and has prevented a possible outage.
  7. Backup plans are vital. We do our best to restore power as quickly as possible, but if you or a loved 1 depends on electricity for life support purposes, you must have a backup plan.
  8. Sometimes all you can do is wait. Our portion of the power grid is connected to other electric utilities. If our outage is due to an issue from their feed into our system, we must wait for them to repair the problem on their end before we will have power on our grid.

We do our best to avoid power disruptions, but they still occur from time to time. The best way to get updates on outages is to download our SmartHub app which will enable you to automatically receive outage notifications via text message or email if your account is affected. We also update larger outages on the Facebook page and there is an outage map on our website at the WREC website.