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Power Outages

Reporting an Outage

To report an outage, call Tri-County EMC:

  • At anytime
  • Day or night
  • Weekends
  • Holidays
  • After hours

Contact Tri-County EMC by:

Phone

(919) 735-2611

(800) 548-4869

Email

Customer service email

Report Outage Form

Please use this form to report an outage.

Member Full Name(Required)

Please provide us with the address or area where this outage has occurred.

Address(Required)
Date and Time of When Outage Started
Date (MM/DD/YYYY)(Required)
Time(Required)
:
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

During an Outage

Check:
  • Your fuses
  • Circuit breakers
  • To see if your neighbor’s power is off

During a major outage event, please be assured that we are aware of the outage and working diligently and safely to restore your electric service.

High call volumes become evident during a major outage causing callers to receive a busy signal or message from the telephone system stating the call cannot be completed.

How Power Is Restored

Our top priority is to restore power safely to the greatest number of members in the shortest time possible.

Restoring power after a major storm is a big job that involves much more than throwing a switch and removing a tree from a line.

The major cause of outages is damage caused by fallen trees. That’s why it is important that we have a right-of-way maintenance program and can count on your support when tree trimming crews are in the area.

Step 1

Transmission towers and lines:

  • Get attention first
  • Supply power to 1 or more transmission substations
  • Seldomly fail, but they can be damaged by a hurricane or tornado
  • Serve tens of thousands of people by a 1 high-voltage transmission line

Step 2

Tri-County EMC has 14 distribution substations:

  • Each serving hundreds or thousands of customers
  • These distribution substations are checked first by local personnel when a major outage occurs

A problem here could be:

  • Caused by failure in the transmission system supplying the substation
  • Corrected at the substation level (power may be restored to a large number of people)

Step 3

Main distribution supply lines:

  • Are checked next if the problem cannot be isolated at the substation
  • Carry electricity away from the substation to a group of consumers, such as an:
    • Individual community
    • Housing development

When power is restored at this stage all consumers served by this supply line could see the lights come on, as long as there is no problem farther down the line.

Step 4

Tap lines:

  • Are the final supply lines
  • Carry power to the utility poles or underground transformers outside houses or other buildings

Line crews fix the remaining outages based on restoring service to the greatest number of members.

Step 5

Sometimes damage will occur on the service line between your house and the transformer on the nearby pole:

  • This can explain why you have no power when your neighbor does
  • Tri-County needs to know if you have an outage here so a service crew can repair it

Step 6

Members (not the co-op) are responsible for damage to the service installation on the building, call:

  1. ) A licensed electrician to make repairs
  2. ) The cooperative so power can be restored

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