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CVEC Restores Power to Lincoln area Following Tornado
TALLADEGA, Ala. - Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative customers living in the
Lincoln area experienced a small tornado Friday evening.
A press release from the Talladega County Emergency Management Agency
said that the National Weather Service in Birmingham classified the twister
as an F-0 tornado. The twister struck at approximately 6:30 p.m. in several
locations in Lincoln and the surrounding areas.
CVEC dispatched five crews to address the damage, the most severe of which occurred
south of Interstate 20 in the Embry Cross Roads area. Also, strong winds from
the tornado pushed a tree against a joint-use, double three-phase circuit between
I-20 and Speedway Boulevard. The circuit is classified as "joint-use"
because it serves both CVEC and Alabama Power customers.
"This kind of damage is unusual, because it's both severe and isolated,"
said Frank Kujawski, CVEC general manager. "While our crews may not be
running all over our system repairing a lot of small outages, they are putting
time in to rebuilding a few areas of high damage."
CVEC crews reported that in some locations, the small twister stripped lines
from the poles and wrapped them around trees and limbs.
CVEC received a total of 306 calls reporting outages. Cooperative crews were
able to isolate the areas most damaged and restore power to commercial and other
vital accounts within 45 minutes of the initial reports. All CVEC customers
had power restored by 2:30 a.m.
Kujawski said delays in returning power to some CVEC customers could be attributed
to Alabama Power crews.
"Because we had a joint-use circuit hit, our crews had to make sure that
Alabama Power crews were finished with their work in that area before we could
energize those lines. So, there was some delay there, thankfully not to a lot
of customers," Kujawski said.
Coosa Valley Electric, which serves more than 15,000 customers in Talladega,
St. Clair, Shelby, Clay, Etowah and Calhoun counties, is a Touchstone Energy7
cooperative. Nationwide, some 1,000 cooperatives provide power to rural America,
and 570 of those operate under the Touchstone Energy umbrella.
For more information, contact:
Jon Cullimore 362-4180 or 1-800-273-7210, ext. 225, Fax: 256-761-2615, Cell: 256-299-0551
Barbara Edmondson 1-800-273-7210, ext. 224
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