SMECO Continues Power Restoration Work

As of 12:15 pm Thursday, January 6, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative has about 1,626 members without electric service following Monday’s snowstorm.

“At the peak, we had more than 1,000 outage incidents on Monday. This morning, we have whittled that number down to 212. An outage incident can be an open switch that affects two homes, a tree on a line that affects 100 homes, or a downed feeder that affects 1,000 homes. With 1,626 customers out and 212 incidents remaining, you can easily determine that for every repair that needs to be made, on average, only a few customers will have service restored,” said Tom Dennison, SMECO spokesman.

“Normally, when we get to this point after a storm, the most difficult and least accessible areas need to be addressed. In some cases, we may need to replace a pole, which takes several hours, or we may need to make repairs on a line that is not near a paved road. We are working to make as many repairs by tonight as possible. SMECO’s outage map will show an incident-specific ETR once a crew determines how long the repair will take,” he continued.

The status of SMECO’s power outages, helpful information, and outage reporting link are available here.

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative is a customer-owned electric cooperative providing electricity to more than 150,000 services in southern Prince George’s County, Charles County, St. Mary’s County, and Calvert County.

To learn more about SMECO, visit its Leader member page. Visit SMECO on their Facebook Page and Twitter.