Ahead of the Storm

South Alabama Electric Cooperative (SAEC) Prepares for Outages When Severe Weather Is Forecast

Don Wambles knew the storm damage was bad when he set out around dawn on a Sunday morning in March.

Wambles, coordinator of the Salem-Troy Baptist Association’s disaster relief team, lives not far from where an EF2 tornado with peak winds of 130 mph tore through Pike County on March 15.

The storm flipped an 18-wheeler and took down power lines along U.S. Highway 231 near Walmart in Troy. Many homes suffered roof damage, windows blew out, and trees fell on houses. Near the Ebenezer community, several mobile homes were destroyed. Metal was wrapped around trees. Thankfully, there were no fatalities.

The tornado damaged 61 utility poles on South Alabama Electric Cooperative’s network and resulted in 3,800 outages among members.

Wambles started pulling volunteers together immediately to help clean up storm debris and get tarps up to protect people’s homes.

“It was just an outpouring of neighborly love, really, like you don’t see anymore,” he says. “It was amazing how everybody worked together. We understood power was a priority, but we had to get the roads clear so they could get in there to restore power.”

SAEC gauges the risk when severe weather is expected, keeping crews on standby to begin any necessary repairs as soon as it’s safe to do so. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure what will happen with a storm system.

The March 15 tornado touched down around 11 p.m. near the Mossy Grove area of Pike County. It left a swath of torn-up earth, broken utility poles, and debris for more than 21 miles. In the hours before the tornado, SAEC crews spent the day responding to outages caused by high winds preceding the main storm system. When crews wrapped up for the day, they thought they had seen the worst of it.

A few hours later, the tornado touched down near Troy.

“We were close to being out of the woods,” says Andy Kimbro, SAEC vice president of member services.

In the days after the storm, SAEC received help from Pea River Electric Cooperative as well as 2 private contractors, Southern States and Kings Table Powerline Service Inc., that contract with SAEC and already had crews in the area.

It was nearly 48 hours before SAEC crews restored the last outage, and even 2 weeks later, linemen were still working in some areas.

Kimbro says SAEC does its best to be prepared when severe weather conditions are forecast.

“You just know there’s a major storm coming. There will be outages. There will be broken poles,” Kimbro says. “You need to be ready.”

But in some cases, it’s not even a storm that causes damage. This year, SAEC has had 2 large outages caused by vehicles striking utility poles. And while there are always after-hours crews on call, a broken 3-phase pole like the 1 the collision involved requires an entire construction crew for repairs, Kimbro says.

Predicting when accidents will happen is impossible. Weather, however, is easier to prepare for because you know it’s coming, and outages are likely to happen, Kimbro says. With hurricanes, for example, the cooperative knows what kind of winds to expect if a storm makes landfall along the Northwest Florida coast.

“It’s not a matter of if,” Kimbro says. “It’s coming and it will be here at 4 a.m., so you know you’re fixing to get broken poles with this storm.”

Severe thunderstorms are more challenging, he says. And even if severe storms don’t impact SAEC, they could always impact a neighboring cooperative.

“You may get a tornado, you may not,” Kimbro says. “You may get the hard straight-line winds that can be just as bad as tornadoes. You may not. You know it’s coming. It’s going to get somebody, and you just don’t know if it’s going to get you or not, but you’ve got to be prepared.”