CHELCO: first day after Hurricane Michael

DEFUNIAK SPRINGS, Fla., October 11, 2018 – At approximately 1:00 p.m. local, 14,636 CHELCO members are without electricity.

The greatest numbers of affected members are located south of the bay in communities served by Grayton Beach, Eastern Lake and Point Washington substations. This outage is primarily due to damaged transmission lines delivering power from the Panama City area. Once the owners of the transmission lines complete their repairs, CHELCO will begin restoration in that area.

Outages peaked at about 21,000 member-accounts without service at around 4 p.m. yesterday.

Restoration efforts began yesterday once conditions were no longer extremely hazardous. Crews worked throughout the night and were augmented with over 100 line workers from sister cooperatives and contractors. The cooperative crews from Pearl River Valley Electric Power Association and Coast Electric both from southern Mississippi arrived this morning.

Outages can be monitored on CHELCO’s outage map. A link is available at CHELCO.com. Members who visited the site when it was down will need to refresh their web browser to access the map.

Members should report their outages even if the outage map reflects their area. CHELCO can better track, assess, and plan repairs when the most accurate information is available in our systems ultimately leading to quicker restoration times.

All CHELCO offices are open except for the Santa Rosa Beach location. Members can also follow CHELCO on Facebook @myCHELCO or CHELCO.com for office hours, outage information, storm safety and preparation information.

CHELCO is a not-for-profit electric distribution cooperative serving more than 52,000 accounts in Walton, Okaloosa, Holmes and Santa Rosa counties.

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