Blue Ridge Electric Crews work through Storm to keep Power on

There are no known storm-related outages on the Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative system thanks to the hard work done by crews to keep the power on in the Upstate of South Carolina, explains Vice President of Communications Terry Ballenger. “Well I think we would consider ourselves fortunate here in the northwestern corner of the state in that we did have some trouble, but it could have been much worse. We had some rain not as much as other parts of the state did and we had some winds that gusted up to 40mph and that was enough to create some trouble for us. We had scattered outages through a good part of the weekend that we had crews working on here. The biggest problem that we had was one main circuit coming out of our Liberty substation in Pickens County where a tree fell on it. We had to purposely turn that circuit off so that we could get the tree off the line. So, about 1,000 of our members were affected by that short outage, we were able to get that restored pretty quick. Then overall we had somewhere around 1,800 people out across the whole system. So, it was mainly scattered stuff and that was the only main circuit that went out. Our folks gave a great account of themselves. We had plenty of help in here in anticipation of there being a lot more trouble than we had. So, fortunately we were able to things cleared up by about 2:30pm Sunday afternoon and all of the storm related stuff was behind us by then.” As soon as power was restored to the area, Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative released in-house crews, contract crews, and the co-op crews from Arkansas that worked on the system to lend assist to electric cooperatives downstate that have suffered major storm damage.