Charley’s Angels
Utility co-ops show true colors sending aid
to Hurricane Charley-ravaged Southern states
By Stephen Thompson,
Assistant Editor
or people in the area
around Wauchula, Fla.,
located on the state’s
mid-Gulf Coast, 2004
was not the best of years.
On Aug.13, Hurricane Charley roared
in from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing
winds of 140 miles per hour and
spawning tornadoes. The storm
knocked down trees, power lines and
poles in the Peace River Electric
Cooperative subscriber area.
Damage was huge, according to
Brad Kimbro, Peace River’s vice president
of marketing and member services:
“Two-thirds of our system suffered
significant damage; and onethird
of that was simply gone.”
That wasn’t all. Two weeks later,
just as soon as Charley’s damage had
been repaired, Hurricane Frances
marched through with huge amounts
of rain and extensive flooding.
Mercifully, it did less damage than
Charley, but still knocked out power to
a significant number of customers. And
Frances was followed three short
weeks later by Hurricane Jeanne,
whose high winds pummeled the area
with a vengeance, toppling power
poles like bowling pins.
$42 billion in damage
While Peace River was the hardest
hit, power co-ops in Georgia, Florida,
Alabama and Mississippi all suffered
varying amounts of damage in the
2004 hurricane season from four major
storms in rapid succession: Charley,
Frances, Ivan (which missed Peace
River) and Jeanne. The 2004 hurricane
season, which totaled nine hurricanes
altogether, caused more than $42 billion
worth of damage — the most
costly hurricane season in history.
Damage was even greater than in
1992, when Hurricane Andrew devastated
southern Florida, causing $35
billion in damage.
Despite widespread damage to
power distribution systems, electric coop
customers had their power restored
in surprisingly quick time in all cases,
an outcome that was made possible by
the dedication of their maintenance
personnel and the help of fellow coops
around the country. More than
100 co-ops from 15 states sent hundreds
of linemen and other workers
with equipment to rebuild distribution
infrastructure. And while the scope
and severity of the damage were much
greater than anyone was used to, the
way it was handled was in many ways
routine.
As the path of Hurricane Charley
began to develop, a call for help went
out from state electric cooperative
associations in the threatened areas.
Rob Land, the director of risk management
for the Association of Missouri
Electric Cooperatives, was attending a
conference in Savannah, Ga., with
Doug Drake, the association’s field
training director, when Charley hit.
Both put in long hours on their cell
phones in their hotel rooms, keeping
notes on scraps of paper as they gathered
information about available
resources from member co-ops,
matched it up with assistance requirements,
and put together a workable
deployment plan. “One problem was
that we only had one cell-phone charger
between us,” chuckles Drake.
Quick assessment crucial
Drake points out that if the affected
co-ops do damage assessments as
quickly as possible, it helps the assisting
co-ops allocate the resources at
hand most effectively.
As the co-op managers were notified,
they in turn asked their employees
for volunteers to pack up and move
their equipment to the affected areas.
“We never have a problem getting help
for this kind of thing,” says Drake.
“Most of the people are anxious to
go.” This is despite the fact that workers
know they will be facing long hours
of hard work in difficult conditions —
up to 18 days, in this case — and that
they may have to put up with lessthan-
ideal sleeping and bathing
arrangements.
The biggest problem, he says, is not
in getting people to go, but in deciding
who is going to stay behind. “When
we’re dedicating resources, we have to
remember that something could happen
at home while we’re away.”
Regardless of the irregular conditions
under which Land and Drake
were working, they managed to put
together an expedition to the south
that arrived in Mississippi just in time
to start putting things back together in
Charley’s wake.
“We’d never worked in that kind of
environment before,” Drake says.
“The damage was similar to that we’ve
seen with tornadoes, but it was much
more widespread. And the working
environment was different, too, with
lots of sand and marshland. Our guys
had to learn how to get their trucks
around in the sand by lowering their
tire pressures.”
Being from the Show-Me State did
have its advantages, though, as a local
line crew found out when they were
faced with the job of digging a hole in
a concrete slab. “They didn’t know
what to do, because they weren’t
equipped for it,” says Drake. “But our
guys have to dig through rock all the
time, so our augurs have tungsten-carbide
teeth on them.” It was one case of
people from Missouri showing someone
else. “They drilled through that
concrete with no trouble at all.”
Co-op aid from near and far
Among other states that sent help
to hurricane-affected areas were
Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. Kentucky alone sent
almost 100 workers and 60 trucks from
12 rural electric cooperatives. Many
who stayed home also put in long
hours: the Kentucky Association of
Electric Cooperative’s transformer
manufacturing plant and the United
Utility Supply Cooperative, also headquartered
in Kentucky, put in long
hours of overtime, including weekends,
to make rewiring supplies and replacements
for damaged distribution equipment.
Bill Davis, Service Manager of
White River Valley Electric
Cooperative in Branson, Mo., agrees
with Drake that getting linemen to
volunteer for the trip wasn’t hard.
“The guys knew there’d be problems,
that they might have to sleep in the
trucks,” he says. “Even when we have
storms at home it’s not easy — they
have to work 15 or 16 hours a day.
They knew we had a job to do, and so
they just went and did it!”
Davis says that it took the trucks
almost two days to travel the 750 miles
to the storm area because of government
commercial driving regulations.
“They waived the rules in Alabama and
Mississippi, so we were able to drive
straight through,” he says.
Their first stop was Singing River
Electric Cooperative, headquartered in
Gautier, Miss. Singing River was damaged
relatively lightly by Charley, so
after a couple of days of work, crews
headed east into Alabama, where they
spent 12 days repairing damage to
Clarke-Washington Electric
Membership Corporation, headquartered
in Jackson.
John Davis of Ozark Electric
Cooperative in Mount Vernon,
Missouri, says that the first lodgings
offered his linemen in Singing River
Co-op’s subscriber area were “pretty
bad.” It wasn’t the fault of the local coop,
he says. The problem was that so
many people had been forced out of
their homes, the only rooms left were
in an old motel that had recently
reopened after being closed for a long
period. But the reactions of the local
people to the appearance of the out-ofstate
crews helped make up for the
grubby conditions: “They were real
happy to see us.”
Small, 4WD trucks prove value
When it came to choosing which
equipment to take south, White River
went against the grain. While most of
the assisting co-ops brought large “line
bucket” trucks and other heavy equipment,
Bill Davis’s crew brought small
“service” buckets mounted on fourwheel-
drive vehicles, which allowed
them to reach downed lines in areas
the heavier trucks couldn’t reach.
Meanwhile, back in Peace River’s
subscriber area, power was almost
completely knocked out. So it was with
relief, tinged with amazement, that
residents watched help arrive in the
form of a parade of almost 100 bucket
trucks, augurs, pole setters and other
equipment. In all, about 700 co-op
men and women from 15 states
descended on Wauchula to help clean
up after Charley.
With almost all power knocked out,
Peace River had figured it would take
months to get all its subscribers back
on line. But with the help of their fellow
co-ops, power was back on for
everyone in only two weeks.
Unfortunately, nobody had much of a
chance to enjoy it.
“Just as soon as we got cleaned up,
Frances came in,” says Kimbro.
Compared to Charley, which had
brought mostly high winds and tornadoes,
Frances was less powerful, but
moved much more slowly. As a result,
it dumped a terrific amount of water
on the area, causing extensive flooding
and, again, many downed lines.
This time the help wasn’t as plentiful,
because Frances cut a much wider
swath, covering most of Florida, and
co-ops all over the state needed help.
Nevertheless, as many as 200 outside
co-op personnel showed up again to
help put things right.
Ivan followed soon after. Projected
to take the path of Charley, it swung to
the west instead, sparing Peace River
but hammering Alabama and the
Florida panhandle before moving north
and east over land toward Virginia.
Later, it moved out to the Atlantic,
looped south and west to cross Florida,
and finally expired in Texas.
Spared by Ivan, and with things up
and running for the second time, Peace
River sent some of its crews to the panhandle
to help out there. Unfortunately,
however, Mother Nature was far from
finished with them.
Hurricane Jeanne pounced from a
different direction than the others —
the east. Its winds, while not quite as
strong as Charley’s, were still strong
enough at 120 miles-per-hour to do
extensive damage to an area still recovering
from the previous two storms.
“We had a four-mile stretch of highway
where every single pole was
down,” says Kimbro. About 140 threephase
distribution poles on that highway
alone had to be replaced or reset.
Again, outside co-ops came to the
rescue, with about 250 linemen and
other workers. “We had 75 trucks
working to restore those lines. They
finished the job in 5 hours. If we’d
done that stretch by ourselves, it would
have taken us 5 weeks,” Kimbro says.
Co-op staff also hard hit
While the volunteers made sacrifices,
the employees of the affected co-ops
were hit hard — working long hours, in
some cases, for weeks on end, as in
Peace River. On top of the extra work,
Peace River employees had to deal with
the effects of the storms on their own
lives and those of their families.
The co-op had over 70 employees
who suffered losses from the storms —
and 13 of them lost everything. “Our
communications manager was one of
those,” says Kimbro. “She noted in a
TV interview that Peace River
employees had suffered losses, and
never hinted about her own.” Kimbro
thinks that the shared ordeal has
strengthened the employees’ relationships
with each other and the co-op as
a whole.
Kimbro also remembers with gratitude
the support Peace River received
from co-op personnel who were unable
to be on the scene. “Central EMC in
North Carolina couldn’t spare personnel,
but they sent a big care package
with soap, sunscreen, deodorant and so
on,” he says. Other co-ops donated
clothing, and the National Rural
Electric Cooperative Association sent
$4,500 for Peace River employees who
suffered damage. “I was really
impressed when I found that the
money was from NRECA employees.”
Brad Kimbro says he is “really humbled”
by the effort made by his own coop’s
employees and by hundreds of
employees of fellow co-ops to get Peace
River’s subscribers back on-line. “I hope
they never need help like we did,” he
says, “But if they do, we’ll respond.”
