Neighborhoods along northern Alabama were flattened by the string of 53 tornadoes that touched down in the area on April 27.
"It looks like a bomb went off.”
That was the reaction most of us had to the jaw-dropping images of the devastation caused by the tornadoes that touched down in northern Alabama on Wednesday, April 27.
It took a while to fully comprehend the scale of the destruction: Entire neighborhoods and even small towns were reduced to splinters by the force of twisters that were a mile wide in places and packing 200 mph winds. The news only got worse in the days and weeks following the storms. Eventually we would learn that more than 230 people died, and the property damage was somewhere in the $4 billion range.
The next morning, no one knew the full extent of the damage, but it didn’t matter. What we did know was that our fellow co-ops in Alabama needed assistance to restore power, and barely 24 hours after the storms struck, 52 line workers from six S.C. electric cooperatives—Aiken, Laurens, Blue Ridge, Fairfield, Mid-Carolina and Newberry— were already rolling west to help.
Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative
At the time, outages were spread across 13 cooperatives in the northern part of Alabama, leaving more than 230,000 members without power. Scott Bryant, the vice president of loss control and training here at The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, coordinated the response of the S.C. co-ops with his counterpart in Alabama, and the rapid, effective action was one of the first steps to returning life to normal for the victims of this disaster.
Fast forward to another stormy Wednesday—May 11, right here in South Carolina. Although the damage was not as extensive, the violent weather that ripped through the Palmetto State was almost as intense as the Alabama tornadoes. Large trees were uprooted and thrown into transmission lines and substations, causing widespread power outages that affected more than 50,000 people across the Palmetto State. York Electric Cooperative reported that, at the peak of the storm, one-third of its members were without power. Broad River Electric Cooperative in Gaffney had 1,350 members who experienced storm-related outages and Fairfield Electric Cooperative in Winnsboro reported 900 outages.
Once again, our network of co-ops responded quickly to provide mutual assistance. A total of 32 line workers from Aiken, Laurens, Edisto, Little River and Newberry cooperatives helped reconnect members in the affected areas as fast as humanly possible. By the time of York’s annual meeting three days later, power was fully restored in the co-op’s service area—an impressive feat that demonstrates the co-op commitment to excellent service.
Our electric cooperatives exist to serve members with reliable, affordable power. They have contingency plans for nearly every disaster, and they invest in the tools, training and dedicated personnel to ensure that they can respond in the worst of conditions. It’s also part of the co-op DNA to help others in need and why we have mutual aid protocols in place. We help our fellow co-ops because we know that someday we might need their help, but mostly because it’s simply the right thing to do.