When power went down along West Wendover’s Tibbets Blvd. during the early hours of Dec. 31, Wells Rural Electric Co. crews responded immediately to complete significant repairs on an underground line and restore electric service to owners in the area.
Crews from West Wendover and Wells worked together to restore power by noonafter repairing a feeder to the main line. With owners facing temperatures below freezing, Wendover foreman Kyle Murphy said their No. 1 priority was restoring electricity as quickly and safely as possible. WREC crews were able to find a solution that reduced the outage time by several hours.
“We all know what water does when it freezes so we worked as hard as we could to make sure people had power back as quickly as we could,” Murphy said.
While outages are part of the utility business, WREC crews perform a comprehensive preventative maintenance program throughout the year to limit potential outages as much as possible. When the power does go out, WREC’s crews are continually training to respond quickly and safely. In 2015, WREC owners had power more than 99.5 percent of the time.
Owners experiencing outages can also help speed up restoral times by calling WREC’s 24-hour Outage Hotline at (800) 566-6696. WREC encourages owners who lose power to never assume someone else has reported an outage. Reporting outages provides information that reduces the time it takes WREC’s crews to identify the scale and location of a given outage and respond as efficiently as possible.
And this past Tuesday, down in Ely, Ms. Irene Lopez, while driving on 10th street, was unable to stop at the stop sign at the intersection of Ave I, because of icy roads. She slid through the intersection striking the vehicle of Dustin D. Gledhill from Ely.
Also, Mr. Levi Whittaker, a young man of Ely, was driving on Bobcat Drive, when he lost control of his vehicle and got in a collision with Carolyn V. Stone, also because of icy conditions.