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I hope most of you have noticed the increase in our system reliability over the past several years - the result of a more aggressive tree trimming program and millions of your dollars which have been spent undergrounding our power lines. Development on the mainland has also reduced the amount of transmission system over there that is at risk from trees. In spite of all of our efforts, high winds could still knock out our power for several days, and we all need to be prepared in case that happens. Everyone should be prepared to go without power for three to five days. This includes food that can be cooked with available facilities or doesn't need cooking, water, firewood for those with a wood stove, flashlights, candles, and so on. The very young and the very old require special consideration, and it is important to develop a plan to deal with this before there is a need. Our new telephone system does a pretty good job of handling phone calls from a small outage, but, like other utilities, we are swamped when we have a major outage. We currently serve about 8,000 homes in San Juan County. A major outage can generate tens of thousands of phone calls in the first hour as people try to find out what is happening. There is no way that we (or any other utility) can handle this number of calls. On the other hand, you do need to call us at least twice a day during an extended power outage. When we restore power to a subdivision or neighborhood, we call a couple of people to make sure power is back on. Twice (that I know about) in the eight years I have been your manager, we have had people who were overlooked due to a localized problem and who spent a day without power when they did not need to. The moral is, call us if your power goes out, but if you can't get through, check with your neighbors and friends to see how widespread the outage is, then give us a couple of hours to get the problem sorted out. And remember Bechtel's first rule of power outages - eat the ice cream first! Doug Bechtel
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