No Snow related Power Problems in Tri-County Upstate

There were no snow related power problems in the Upstate of South Carolina associated with this latest round of snow, reports Terry Ballenger, Vice President of Communications for Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative. “We’re real pleased with how things went. We didn’t suffer really any storm related outages in the wake of that storm. Our system held up pretty well. We didn’t have any lines that were particularly overloaded or anything like that and we didn’t have enough snow, I think, in the Anderson, Oconee and Pickens area to really threaten to bring any tree limbs down on our system. So, we did alright.” Ballenger credits the Cooperative’s engineering plan for keeping the power on during the winter weather. “We’ve been able to fair well, we believe, because of the emphasis we’ve placed on building capacity into our system. We have a four-year engineering work plan that we are presently working on. Our crews are heaving up power lines, building new power lines and we’re going to bring a substation online soon. These are the kinds of things that we’re doing to try stay ahead of the growth on our system and we are seeing growth once again. We’ve seemed to come out of the effects of the Great Recession and now we’re keeping our construction crews and operations crews pretty busy running new services and upgrading lines for businesses that are expanding and that sort of thing. So, we count ourselves fortunate that we do have a system that is in pretty good shape.” Customers should expect higher power bills, concludes Ballenger. “We have had a real cold week of weather and it wasn’t but just a little while ago we had ten straight days of unbelievable cold weather, so we’ve got some big power bills that are going to start showing up in folks mailboxes soon because of all this cold weather. Their heating systems, their water heaters and those sorts of things are going to be working harder as long as we have low temperatures like that. It looks like we are getting ready to have some relief later this week as the weather warms up but we have had some very, very cold weather so far this January.” To report an outage, call 1-888-BLUERIDGE.