Ocracoke line relocation along Highway 12 to reduce exposure to ocean overwash

The best preparation for a hurricane is, unfortunately, the hurricanes that preceded it. There are always lessons to be learned.

At Tideland, every storm response is evaluated to better prepare us for the next event. Likewise, we learn from other co-ops and how similar scenarios might play out here at home. One such co-op is Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC) in Live Oak, Florida. Following Helene, they deployed more than 1,482 mutual aid crew members to restore power to their 28,000 member co-op. SVEC had 767 broken poles. During Florence, Tideland had 40 broken poles with 133 crew members responding. In Irene and Dorian our broken pole totals were 135 and 80 respectively. Preparedness requires that we think larger than our own worst storm.

With everyday system reliability and storm resiliency in mind, Tideland has made targeted capital investments to harden our infrastructure. The most recent evidence of that was our relocation of 17 poles at Ocracoke to provide additional protection from ocean overwash on Highway 12. We were able to complete that work prior to the arrival of September’s king tide.

Following Florence, Tideland took the unprecedented step of securing the guaranteed resources of a storm service team that has the capacity to establish a base camp for visiting crews if we were to experience an outage similar to SVEC. While we hope such an agreement never has to be activated, knowing we have the ability to house, feed and care for an army of mutual aid crews and contractors gives us a significant recovery advantage.

Lastly, I want to remind our membership of the important role both FEMA and the state of North Carolina play in the cooperative’s financial recovery from a declared disaster. Tideland qualifies for FEMA’s Public Assistance Program which reimburses 75% of our storm-related expenses. NC Emergency Management has historically made our losses whole by reimbursing the remaining 25%. Following Hurricane Irene, those reimbursements equated to $125 per Tideland member. Those are dollars we did not have to recover through rates and therefore benefit everyone regardless of individual need.