Step by Step
to Restoring
Your Power

The first line worker to take action is the serviceman. This employee is a first responder, an experienced line worker who troubleshoots problems on SMECO’s electric system. A service crew is the serviceman teamed with a line worker who is an Apprentice 7 or above, assigned as a helper. Together, they are first to arrive at the general location of the outage.

If a member reports their lights out during the working day, SMECO sends the service crew that is closest, so that we can restore power quickly. During evenings and weekends, the service crews rotate among weekly shifts where they are on call—nine crews in the Central Region and seven crews in the Southern Region.

A serviceman receives an outage alert from SMECO’s ARCOS text notification system regardless of the time of day. For off-hours outages, “you have to get ready like you’re going to work in the morning,” said Rob Dennee, a serviceman in the Southern Region. “You have to pre-trip the truck, making sure it has enough fuel and motor oil and the tires are filled and so forth. You log onto the truck’s computer and check the details of the job. Then I text my helper to let him know where we’re going. Sometimes he gets there first.”

For small outages at night, Dennee will attempt to call the SMECO member who reported the fault. He pulls into the driveway and makes the call, letting the member know that the cooperative is working on the problem.

“I treat the customers how I want to be treated. The person may not know I’m coming, so sometimes I will flash my truck lights to let them know I’m there, so I don’t frighten them,” Dennee said. “If I can fix the problem on site with the tools I have, I’ll take care of it and energize the line.”

Repairing an outage often means replacing a damaged pole or insulator or transformer, a job that requires heavier equipment than a service crew typically carries. In such cases, the serviceman contacts the Operations Center and reports what they found at the scene. The center notifies the available chief linemen, who, like the servicemen, have a rotating call schedule for evenings and weekends. The chiefs assemble their crews at the regional office, discuss the specifics of the job, collect the parts they need, and head to the scene of the outage.

If the repair work will put our crews in traffic or close to an edge of a road, SMECO also asks a contractor to send a flagging crew to control traffic.

“A lot of times at night, I’ll ask to close down the road just because it’s secluded,” said Chief Lineman Andrew DeAtley, who has been with SMECO for 20 years. “In those conditions, any traffic can be dangerous to work in.”

Once at the job site, the assembled crews hold a tailgate conference to plan their work strategy and make sure everything is safe. Then they obtain clearance from the SMECO Operations Center to disconnect and ground any lines that must be repaired. It’s a two-way process that includes verification by both the Center’s system operators and the team in the field, ensuring that any other crews working up or down the line are protected from electric shock.

Many lines have reclosers, switches that allow SMECO to isolate a broken section and feed the other sections from a different substation or feeder line. “A substation is like a human heart and the feeder lines are like arteries, so the reclosers are like smaller arteries,” Dennee said. “We try to sectionalize the line to keep as many people on as possible, while still protecting our equipment at the substation.”