Clark Electric members experience another outage

About 890 Clark Electric Cooperative members were without power again for a stretch on Christmas Eve. The latest outage was a biproduct of ice buildup, bitter cold and wind according to CEC Director of Operations Mike Ruff.

The outage is the latest in a string of outages that began due to icy and wintery weather mixtures that blew through the area on December 16.

Ruff said the battering ram of failures has been stressful for staff at the co-op.

“The last week and a half has been very challenging here for everyone from office staff to line personnel,” Ruff said. “There has been many days where it’s been all hands on deck doing anything from answering the phones to putting wires back up on poles. Christmas Eve day wasn’t much different, we had a number of weather related outages.”

According to Ruff, the outages that mostly plagued the Colby and Abbotsford areas were caused by a substation outage. The substation had failures as a result of the ice build-up, wind and cold weather. There were 890 customers without power for approximately three hours due to that particular outage.

Around CEC’s coverage area, 375 other customers experienced outages at some point during Christmas Eve.

Ruff said employees spent some or most of their holidays out in the bitter cold in order to get power back on for those in their coverage area.

“We had several crews responding to outages throughout the day,” Ruff said. “During times of such bitter cold we do our very best to get everyone back in power just as soon as we possibly can. We are thankful to have a great bunch of employees that are dedicated to their profession and are willing to go out and brave the elements when everyone else is hunkering down.”

Ruff said he was proud of the way the crews responded and said they are willing to respond at any time of the day or night.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a week day or holiday, middle of the day or middle of the night, nasty or nice, they are ready and willing to respond.”