Contact: Priscilla Knight, 703-392-1580, pknight@novec.com
At 7 a.m. Tuesday, February 14, NOVEC Operations reported that service had been restored to all customers known to have been affected by the major snow storm that toppled trees and downed power lines in all portions of the NOVEC service area. Any NOVEC customer still without service as a result of the storm should call the cooperative immediately at 703-335-0500 or 1-888-335-0500.
Outage records indicate that nearly 12,000 NOVEC customers were affected during the course of the storm. The peak outage number was 6,800 at 7 a.m. on Sunday, February 12.
“We would like to thank our customers for their patience,” said Allen Barbee, Assistant Vice President of Electric System Operations. “Folks seemed to understand what we were up against and appreciated our around the clock efforts to get service restored safely and quickly. Large scale power restoration requires a total team effort and we got that from employees across the company. Their extra efforts made a real difference. Our crews in the field were ably assisted by contractors and crews from Central Virginia Electric Cooperative and Prince George Electric Cooperative. The company is extremely proud of their performance,” said Barbee.
While pleased with the overall effort, Barbee noted that a post-event analysis will be done to look for ways to improve. “There’s always opportunity to improve our performance,” he said. “We learn from every experience and I’m sure our employees and customers will provide valuable feedback we can use to do an even better job next time.”
