EEI SOPD Practice Test 4

Restoring Service After a Major Storm

¹After a major storm, a utility may face hundreds of outages at once, far more than its crews can repair in a single day, or even in a week. Restoration therefore follows a set order of priorities. The goal is to restore service to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible while protecting public safety.

²Safety comes first. Before repair work begins, crews respond to reports of downed wires near roads, homes and schools. These wires may still be energized. Crews make them safe by de-energizing or guarding them, even when that work restores no customers at all, because a single contact with such a wire can be fatal.

³Next, crews repair the transmission lines and substations that serve large areas. A single damaged transmission line can leave tens of thousands of customers without power, and no repair farther down the system will help those customers until that line is back. Crews then turn to critical facilities such as hospitals, water treatment plants and emergency dispatch centers, because whole communities depend on them.

⁴After that come the main distribution lines, called feeders, each of which serves hundreds or thousands of customers. Only when the feeders are restored do crews work on the smaller tap lines that serve a few streets, and finally on the service drops that connect individual homes. A customer whose own service drop is damaged may therefore wait longer than the neighbors, even though the repair itself is small.

⁵This order can seem unfair to a customer who watches a crew drive past a fallen line on a quiet street. The crew is not ignoring that customer; it is on its way to a repair that will restore far more people. Explaining the order of priorities to the public, through news releases and the utility's recorded phone message, helps customers understand the wait.