In Ohio, weather-related outages occur in every season. To make matters worse, a variety of other problems, ranging from curious critters to human errors, often cause power outages as well.

At its February meeting, the board of trustees reviewed the annual outage summary, which showed maintenance efforts and technology enhancements are paying dividends when it comes to providing reliable service to our members.
In 2018, the cooperative experienced 480 outages, 19 higher than the 10-year average of 461 outages per year. Tree issues were the most common cause at 31 percent of the outages, followed by equipment-related outages at 26 percent. 
The average length of time members were without power slightly decreased in 2018 by 13 minutes to 2 hours and 47 minutes from 3 hours in 2017.    

 
“With advanced upgrades by the engineering department and the dedicated commitment to maintenance from our linemen, we have been able to keep outage times to a minimum,” says Operations Manager Tim Rising. “Our maintenance efforts show when severe weather hits. Unfortunately, we do see the occasional transmission outages that are out of our control.” 

LMRE continues to expand and grow the use of its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. SCADA systems help restore distribution line outages more quickly through automation versus manually doing everything in the field.
Reducing span length between poles, regular pole testing, tree trimming, and removal of trees and vegetation is very important to the reliability of LMRE lines. The cooperative has an aggressive right-of-way program, spending more than $1 million every three years. Trees still represent one of the largest causes of outages. 

Clearing tree branches and vegetation from rights-of-way reduces blinks and outages.