Contact: Priscilla Knight, 703-392-1580, pknight@novec.com
NORTHERN VIRGINIA – The Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative launched a new electric power outage center on its website, www.novec.com, on Oct. 19, 2010. The center allows website visitors to see outages occurring on NOVEC's system in real-time.
John Roy, communications specialist, says the new outage center provides more accuracy, details, and clarity for customer-owners, family members and the media: “The outage summary has been streamlined and can be seen on the same page with the map. Users can zoom in and click on outage icons to view power outage details. The icons will indicate whether or not the Co-op has assigned a crew to a particular outage. Additionally, users can click on the names of counties in NOVEC's service territory for a list of streets where power is out. Users can also view a four-day history graph to see how many customers were without electricity at a particular time.”
A website user can enter an address to see if a certain home or business has power. A customer can enter his or her account number and get an estimate of when power will be restored to his or her property.
“With the old outage online system, users couldn't easily correlate an outage with a particular address.” Roy explains. “The new system displays power status on the customer's account page whether or not an outage has been reported for the customer’s address.”
Users can click on the name of a NOVEC county to see the location and number of customers affected by outages. Users can save the map page for later viewing under My Maps. The system will keep it up to date automatically.
Roy notes that NOVEC's in-house Lockheed Martin programmers used Google's Map Application Programming Interface to build the new outage center. He says, “This new tool will help customer-owners navigate the map easily.”
