Alabama’s rural electric cooperatives ready to respond to Irma

12:15 p.m. Sept. 11 – Rural electric cooperatives from Alabama are committed to sending crews to help Florida’s cooperatives with power restoration in the wake of Hurricane Irma. Some of Alabama’s co-ops are waiting until Irma has cleared our state before sending crews southward, so they can be ready to handle potential outages in their service territories.

Cooperatives from other states north of Alabama already have crews en route to Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Baldwin EMC, headquartered in Summerdale, is no stranger to storms and outages, and has bunkhouses that have been made available to electric utility crews from other states who need a place to stay on their way to the storm-damaged areas.

Few of Alabama’s co-ops were reporting outages as of 11 a.m. Monday, Sept. 11 – about 2,500 outages statewide. This is in stark contrast to Florida: Cooperatives are reporting that more than 75 percent of their members were without power as of Monday morning.

Alabama’s rural electric cooperatives deliver power to more than 1 million people, or a quarter of the state’s population, and they maintain more than 71,000 miles of power line.