One of the seven principles that electric cooperatives live by, and one that sets us apart from most any other utility service, is “Cooperation Among Cooperatives.” Since the inception of Rural Cooperatives, it was found that like any team, we are the most effective and strongest when we work together. The nature of our infrastructure, lines connecting to neighbor’s lines, which connect to the larger grid, work the best when there is cooperation amongst each other. We depend on each other when poles and lines are demolished by mother nature’s elements. Every cooperative is faced with those times, when without each other, we would not be able to provide electricity to our members.

For Lane-Scott Electric, one of those times occurred on Saturday, August 7^th. Many people may not be aware of the situation, as only a small area in Ness County was impacted. What was impacted was hit hard. A micro-burst of straight-line winds hit north central Ness County between Ness City and Ransom. Approximately 80 total poles were broken, which caused around 1,ooo meters to be without power at the peak of the outage. The hardest hit area was a 2.5 mile stretch where 56 poles were completely broken.

A call for help was sent to our Western Cooperative neighbors to the north, and Victory Electric to our south who immediately sent mutual aid crews and material to help us restore what had been broken.

“This job would have taken us 10 days to fix on our own. It took only 2.5 days with help from Western and Victory,” said Crew Chief Ben Mann.

All but 35 meters had power restored after the first night. We sincerely appreciate the selfless support from the members, staff, and mutual aid crews from both Western Cooperative and Victory Electric.