REC took a direct hit today from Winter Storm Frida, which downed power lines, toppled trees and knocked out power to more than 90,000 member-owners as of Monday evening.
REC’s Bowling Green and Culpeper regions sustained especially extensive damage, and the Cooperative expects some outages to persist through the end of the work week. The counties of Caroline, Hanover, Louisa, Orange and Spotsylvania were especially hard hit by storm-related outages.
The storm’s impact on the power grid and related equipment left more than 600 individual damage locations for crews to address.
This multi-day restoration effort will be especially difficult due to the expected below-freezing temperatures over the coming nights, and REC urges member-owners to seek shelter or make alternative arrangements as they are able.
REC crews, contractors and related field employees continue to assess damage, make repairs and restore service as quickly and safely as they can. This historic, major winter storm dumped up to a foot of heavy wet snow and brought wind gusts of 40 mph. Many roads remain impassible throughout the service territory.
Several hundred mutual-aid field employees from as far away as Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Georgia and Florida will join with REC’s team as early as tomorrow to continue making repairs and restoring power. These additional crews will bring more bucket trucks and other heavy equipment to speed up restoration efforts.
REC also has 100-plus tree trimming crew members with additional tree trimming resources arriving in our territory tonight.
In restoring power, REC focuses first on the largest outages, including repairs to substations and large distribution circuits.
REC is working with Dominion energy on transmission line disruptions that are affecting large portions of REC’s territory.
While REC has backup call center support in place, due to high call volumes members are encouraged to use REC’s Outage map (myrec.coop/outagecenter) or MyREC SmartHub to report an outage.
“This is a historic outage event for REC,” said Casey Hollins, Managing Director – Communications and Public Relations. “We have mobilized all of our resources and we have mutual aid from other states and cooperatives in VA working to assist REC. We know this is a difficult outage for many of our member-owners and their families, and all employees are working together to get the power back on.”
