How We Restore Power
If a major storm causes major outages, Pearl River Valley Electric's damage assessment and restoration process begins once the storm has passed and it’s safe for our personnel to proceed with gathering information and determining the extent of the damage in the affected areas. Your telephone call reporting an outage is vital because it will be combined with other members’ calls and computer programs will analyze that information to make a prediction as to what lines or other equipment may be out of service. This helps our line crews find the locations of the outages more quickly.
We then proceed using a system of priorities that have been developed taking into account public safety, community needs and the nature of the electric distribution system.
We first work to correct potentially life-threatening situations, such as downed live wires and public health and safety facilities without power. Crews responding to downed wires may not be able to restore power to your residence. They are sent to make the area safe until repair crews can be dispatched. We work closely with federal, state and local emergency management agencies to constantly reassess our restoration priorities.
We then work “downstream” beginning with any problems with the transmission or large distribution lines and focus on restoring power in a sequence that first considers public health and safety, and gets power to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible. Just as when it snows it is not possible to plow side streets before the main thoroughfares are cleared, during a power outage it is not possible to correct problems at individual locations before main substations and distribution feeders are restored.
Next, we work to restore secondary distribution lines serving commercial areas, subdivisions and neighborhoods, working our way down through lines that serve smaller groups of customers and finally to individual homes and businesses.
- Downed live wires or potentially life-threatening situations and public health and safety facilities without power.
- Transmission lines serving thousands of customers.
- Substation equipment.
- Main distribution lines serving large numbers of customers.
- Secondary lines serving neighborhoods.
- Service lines to individual homes and businesses.