Beware of the years with 2s and 0s.

While Kingfisher County has seen intervening ice storms, last week’s October surprise had everyone hearkening back to the last, worst event in recent memory – the January 2002 storm that left some residents without power for more than a month.

Like that event, resolution of power outages, limb removal and cleanup has required an all-hands-on-deck approach from public and private entities – municipal and county governments, Cimarron Electric Cooperative and other utility providers, private electricians and volunteers.

Crews have been working extended shifts, with all departments pulling together to serve the needs of their customers as expeditiously as possible.

But in the intervening 19 years, improvements in technology and infrastructure have minimized the devastation – so much so that at least that much of life is expected to return to normal by early this week.

Cimarron Electric Coop

Every major outage event is a learning experience for Cimarron Electric Cooperative, whose executive management looks for modifications large and small that can make the work of restoring power and communicating with customers as efficient as possible.

For example, customers trying to follow outages and repairs on the coop’s website and app this time were confused by reports that certain substations were offline.

“That information is meaningless if you don’t know which substation feeds your residence, so beginning next month, every customer bill is going to list which substation feeds that account,” Chief Operating Officer Jeff Hyatt said.

But no event triggered more significant changes in how the coop operates in the wake of a storm than the infamous 2002 ice storm, which cut a large swathe of destruction across the coop’s nine-county service area, pulling down more than 18,000 power poles and leaving some areas without power for more than a month.

One of the first changes was a request for the coop board to approve a multimillion-dollar investment in new hardened infrastructure, replacing 1,259 miles of poles and wiring across the system over the course of several years.

“We knew we were asking for a huge investment of resources so we actually asked for the board to vote on it twice to make sure we had their OK,” Cimarron’s CEO Mark Snowden said.

“But that investment has paid for itself in this storm alone.”

That’s not to say that every pole remained standing.

“The weather’s going to do what the weather is going to do and you can’t prevent everything,” COO Jeff Hyatt said.

But the numbers speak for themselves. Poles downed in 2002: 18,000. Poles downed in 2020: less than 200. Technological advances

Technological advances such smart metering, automated materials inventory and outage reporting, GPS monitoring in all vehicles, interactive mapping of damage that also tracks materials required for each repair also made this rodeo a much easier ride than in 2002.

[Online Bonus: For a complete story and photos on Cimarron’s new technology at work, visit our website at kingfisherpress.net.]

But when push comes to shove, the job of making repairs and restoring power is still incredibly labor intensive, and Cimarron like every other utility provider, relies on not only its staff but on mutual aid provided by other utilities not in the storm impacted area.

All Cimarron employees are working extended shifts, most starting at 6 a.m. and working late into the evening.

In addition to its employees, Cimarron has hired some contract crews and is receiving help in men and equipment from four other utilities in Oklahoma and Missouri, Hyatt said.

As of Thursday, Cimarron had whittled its outages down from a high of about 13,000 to under 5,000 and Hyatt said power could be completely restored as soon as the end of the coming week, depending on whether transmission feeds from Western Farmers Electric were back online.

“In some cases we can backfeed from other substations to provide limited power to some areas while we’re waiting on Western Farmers, but that’s not always possible,” Hyatt said.

In Cashion, Cimarron faced another problem in that a neighboring utility company’s line had fallen across a Cimarron line.

“We couldn’t make any repairs until they came and removed that line,” Hyatt said.

Fortunately, that happened on Friday and the Cashion substation was able to be powered up.

“We’re also fortunate we didn’t get hit as hard as many areas served by OGE, which are looking at extended outages in Piedmont and other areas.”

Cimarron asks customers to continue to report outages through its smart hub app, texting or on the website.

City of Kingfisher

Kingfisher City Manager Dave Slezickey said the city of Kingfisher was able to fully restore power to customers as of 8 p.m. Thursday, with brief outages possible going forward as eight poles are being replaced.

The city has received mutual aid from Bentonville, Ark., crews which are handling the pole replacements, he said.

“All city employees did such a great job working together and doing whatever needed doing,” Slezickey said.

“Besides our great electrical crew, the parks and street departments have been helping clear limbs, the police and fire departments have helped by staying at places where lines were down until the electrical crew could get there to make sure they weren’t still live and everyone in the office has been answering phones and helping us track outages.”

Although the city recently installed smart meters, Slezickey said the signs of power outages were obvious enough to trace without the help of the new meters.

“Pretty much everywhere you saw a line on the ground, you knew you had some outages,” he joked.

Slezickey also commended local electricians, who have been working night and day to help with damage on the customers’ side of the system so that power restoration wasn’t delayed.

“We can’t make repairs on wiring that goes directly into customers’ homes,” he said. “That requires licensed electricians and those guys have been great about getting around and getting those repairs done.”