Lyon-Coffey Electric Coop general manager Scott Whittington said he emerged from a Monday afternoon meeting confident that his staff was prepared for any potential weather situation.
“I just brought in all my key staff, and we just gave out assignments from food preparation to accommodations to bringing in additional people, that kind of stuff,” he said from the Lyon-Coffey office in Burlington. “We’ve kept all our crews in today to make sure all our trucks are well stocked and fueled up, and our equipment’s in operating condition.
“Anybody that’s been on vacation, we’ve asked them to stand by if they’re in town, and then we might have to call them back in.”
Beyond preemptive assignments and calls, though, all Lyon-Coffey Electric can really do before the storm happens is sit and wait, Whittington said.
“We’ve contacted all of our suppliers to make sure there’s plenty of poles, cross-arms, wire, all that kind of stuff available to us if we need it,” he said. “Plus, making sure that everything here, at both at our Emporia and Burlington warehouse sites, all the equipment is in working order.
“You can’t do much before it happens, because you certainly don’t know where it’s going to happen.”
Lyon-Coffey has a mutual aid agreement with all the other coops in the state, so if need be, it can get additional manpower from other towns.
The last major ice storm Lyon-Coffey had to deal with came in 2005. Whittington said all FEMA restoration work from that storm was completed earlier this year.
“So I think we were a little ahead of schedule for it,” he said. “I think some of the coops are still working on restoration from that storm.”
Whittington said Cooperative Response Center, the Minnesota-based call center that handles Lyon-Coffey’s after-hours calls, have extra staff available to handle late calls.
“We’re doing everything that we possibly can do in preparation for this thing, if the worst situation does happen," he said. "But of course, we’re all praying that it doesn’t.”