OUC: If a storm hits, pandemic might slow power restoration

It’s not as if anyone needs another thing to worry about, but hurricane season is here and it’s shaping up to be serious. Tropical Storm Cristobal, which made landfall 500 miles from Orlando, spawned tornadoes producing property damage, displaced about 50 residents and caused over 5,000 outages in our service territory.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts an “above normal” Atlantic hurricane season, with 13 to 19 named storms. Let’s hope NOAA’s 2020 predictions fall short, but let’s also prepare for the possibility that even one powerful hurricane striking Central Florida could be devastating. Particularly so if our community remains in the grasp of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the general manager and CEO of OUC, I want to urge our customers to prepare for a big storm. Driving my sense of urgency is concerns of renewed panic buying in the face of an oncoming storm and worries that the COVID-19 crisis could disrupt our ability to assemble the kind of workforce we’ve had in the past to help respond to widespread outages through mutual aid.

Just as emergency responders combine forces to help rebuild communities devastated by natural disasters, OUC and other utilities rely on mutual aid, where line workers and other electric and water utility personnel from across the country come together to turn the lights and water back on. In 2017, after Category 3 Hurricane Irma disrupted power to 60% of our customers, we restored all 240,000 customers in six days with support from hundreds of crews from 20 states.

While the pandemic poses obstacles to our responsiveness to a widespread outage, let me assure you OUC will rise to the challenge if a hurricane strikes here. We are already working closely with the Florida

Municipal Electric Association (a trade organization of 33 state municipal utilities) and other partners on hurricane preparedness and mutual aid response. However, despite this preparation, our customers will experience longer periods of being without power because of the precautions COVID-19 requires to protect crews.

Should a storm hit us amid the pandemic, we will continue to observe social distancing practices among our teams and those from other utilities and ensure they are supplied with personal protective equipment. I ask that if you want to thank the crews as they work in neighborhoods, please do so from a safe distance.

OUC has taken steps over the years to make the energy grid more resilient. We’ve invested in smart grid technology that lessens the impact of outages, trimmed trees near our power lines and hardened the infrastructure supporting the grid. Our line crews, power generation teams and support staff are trained to work through hurricanes. As your hometown utility, we work day and night — in good times and bad — to keep the lights on and water running for our customers.

I encourage you to make sure we have your most current contact information, sign up for outage alerts and follow us on social media so we can quickly communicate with you during a storm. Instructions are at www.ouc.com/stormcenter, which also has a repository of hurricane preparedness and storm tracking information that’s available to everyone.

Anyone who’s lived here for any length of time knows the drill when Orlando is in the path of a storm. But waiting until a storm is imminent to secure supplies likely won’t cut it this hurricane season. So please take this storm season seriously and start your planning now. I know we plan all year long, and together we’ll get through it as a community. Please stay safe and be well.