All customers impacted by outages from storms and strong winds over the weekend and on Monday were restored overnight. Although multiple storm fronts, strong winds and trees weakened by recent periods of drought caused substantial damage to local electrical infrastructure and resulted in outages for about 13,900 customers, Chattanooga’s Smart Grid dramatically reduced the impact by preventing or automatically restoring service to more than 19,200 customers. This amounts to a 58% reduction in the number of customers who would have experienced a duration outage. Here are the final tallies for the impact of the storms and the benefits of the Smart Grid:
· Chattanooga’s Smart Grid prevented outages or automatically restored power to about 19,200 customers (a 58% reduction in outages).
· EPB has repaired damage and restored services to about 13,900 customers who experienced an outage greater than five minutes.
· Of the 13,900 duration outages about 3,500 occurred on Saturday, about 4,100 occurred on Sunday and about 6,300 occurred on Monday.
EPB reminds its customers to stay away from downed power lines and never try to remove fallen trees and branches from power lines. Please report trouble by calling 423-648-1EPB (1372). Customers may also visit epb.com/outage-map to see the latest outages and stay connected with the latest information on EPB of Chattanooga’s Facebook and Twitter pages.