Released 1/5/2021 at 12:00 p.m., Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO) crews and contractors have been working since the early morning hours of Monday, January 3, to restore electric service to members who were affected by weather-related power outages.
Between 6:30 a.m. Monday and 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, January 5, SMECO has had 78,600 customers affected by power outages; some of these have experienced multiple interruptions. More than 72,300 have been energized and had power restored.
As of 11:30 a.m., about 5,266 customers remain without power. SMECO spokesperson, Tom Dennison, said, “Our SMECO crews and our contractor crews are working diligently to restore electric service to as many people as possible, as quickly and safely as possible. We have about 914 outages in St. Mary’s County and hope to have nearly all of them restored tonight. We have about 1,092 outages in Calvert County, and most of them should have power tonight. In Charles and Prince George’s counties we have a total of about 3,260 customers without power. Many of them may not have service restored until tomorrow night.”
Dennison added, “Across every part of our service territory, we have experienced 60 feeder outages—that is 25 percent of our feeders. All feeders have been restored, except for one feeder at our Grayton substation. The majority of outages that we are working now have been caused by heavy snow on limbs and trees, which the crews must remove with chainsaws before repairing power lines. We also have a lot of cross arms breaking, as well as poles.” SMECO’s crews work to make sure substation feeders and major distribution lines are operational before making repairs to tap lines and individual service lines.
The status of SMECO’s power outages, helpful information, and outage reporting link are available at smeco.coop/outage.
