After you have reported your outage, it is logged into our CWEP outage management system so crews can determine a repair strategy, especially for significant outages.
Outage Center Faqs
During widespread power outages, determining estimated times for restoration on a per customer basis is not feasible. Please be assured that CWEP crews will work diligently to get our customers restored.
During catastrophic outages, such as mass tornado damage or significant ice damage, repairs often start by fixing problems starting from the power plants and working out toward the substations and feeders, and then into the individual neighborhoods and homes. CWEP's crews also try to prioritize the repairs by fixing the areas that will restore power to the most customers at a time or do the greatest good for the community (hospitals, emergency services).
If you work from home, an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) is a great device to have on hand. This device will keep your electronics running during a brief outage, and the battery backups allow you to keep your Internet and PCs up and running in case of an outage.
During major outage situations, just because you haven’t spotted a crew in front of your home doesn’t mean that CWEP isn’t working on repairs to your line in a different section of your neighborhood.
There can be many reasons why this situation has occurred. For example, different feeders or transmission lines may be serving opposite sides of the street. If the power outage is isolated to your specific home, there could be damage to your service line or your weatherhead. A call to a qualified, licensed electrician could help.
In outages, utility workers, for safety and restoration purposes, may need to de-energize circuits from time-to-time, depending on the repair work that needs to be accomplished. In this case, the subsequent outage should be short-term, usually lasting for an hour or so. During these types of outages, your patience is requested, and it is not required that you notify our outage center.
If tree limbs are touching the electric service line to the home, CWEP crews will trim the trees as necessary to restore power. If the electric service line to the home must be replaced, CWEP crews will perform necessary tree trimming to replace the service line. In both cases, the customer is responsible for removal of cut trees and tree limbs from their property.