“What we can’t stress enough is to make a plan,” Kroger said. “Inside temperatures in your home can drop really quickly without power, so make a plan, check on your loved ones, check on your neighbors. We can’t stress that enough.”
The weekend’s high winds will likely be the cause of most outages, though it’s impossible to know just how drastic the outages might be. Often in high winds, branches will break or trees will topple over onto power lines and cause outages.
Kroger said there are several different types of workers needed to get lines restored. Duke Energy’s damage assessors will be scanning its territories, and they will then decide whether the damage needs a vegetation crew to come move branches or fallen trees before calling in a bucket truck to completely restore power.
“There’s an order of operations that needs to happen so we can say, ‘This is the problem, these are the resources that we need, and now it’s safe to make the restoration,’” Kroger said.
There’s also the aspect of crew safety that will need to be considered, Kroger said. This weekend is set to bring wind chills nearing minus-15 degrees, and the actual “bucket” of bucket trucks cannot be used as long as winds stay above 35 mph.
This storm also spans across much of the Midwest, which will present different challenges than some of the most recent power outages Butler County has seen — namely, the ability for electric utility providers to share crews in emergency cases.
This past June, for example, Butler County experienced significant electrical damage from a storm system that touched down sporadically across the state of Ohio, but the storm didn’t have the same broad area that this weekend’s storm is expected to.
A more localized storm meant that Duke Energy could borrow crews from nearby utility providers, or even bring in crews from their own operation territories in Indiana, northern Kentucky and North Carolina.
For this reason, Kroger said it’s hard to know how many crews will be available to help out locally, but added that “We have made additional crews aware and we will have as many resources as possible.”
“We may run into a problem [there] because if you look at the projected forecast, this is a very widespread event; this is covering almost the entire midwest,” Kroger said. “There may not be a whole lot of crews that our partner utilities can give up… After it hits us (here), it’s gonna go straight to North Carolina, so it’s kind of an all hands on deck sort of thing.”
This expected outage can be further juxtaposed with the June outages, as both will have occurred during extreme temperatures. June’s heat index was the hottest of the year, and a lack of power in folk’s homes made temperatures dangerous in certain contexts.
The Journal-News reported that one Middletown homeowner, who was without power for nearly 50 hours as heat indeces reached triple digits, estimated that his second floor likely reached 100 degrees.
Kroger stressed the importance of making a plan to deal with possible cold temperatures inside the home and even potentially planning to have an alternate location in case power cannot be restored promptly.
“We are prepared. We’re kind of in a holding pattern right now, because we obviously can’t do anything until the power is out,” Kroger said, but urged for patience if progress doesn’t seem like it’s being made immediately. Kroger added that if outages do occur, crews will be “working their tails off” to get power restored quickly and safely.
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