Rescue Restoration

As the morning sun rose on what would become a hot 103-degree day, five United linemen and about a dozen more of their colleagues busied themselves about the yard at the Cleburne office trying to prepare for a seven-hour drive to East Texas.

It was hard to imagine the devastation they’d drive into, considering the partly cloudy skies and cool morning air. But as they’d travel toward the Texas/Louisiana border, they’d see the destruction wrought by Hurricane Laura, which made landfall in the early hours of Aug. 27 and stopped more than 21,000 electric meters from turning at Jasper-Newton Electric Co-op.

United was one of five or six other co-ops offering to help restore power. Those from United who participated included Josh Koopmann, a journeyman lineman from Meridian; Rygh Fullagar, a first class lineman from Stephenville; Jeremiah Esquell, the Stephenville district foreman; Thomas Smith, a journeyman lineman from Granbury; and Mark Samuel, an apprentice lineman III from Burleson.

This was the first hurricane restoration for Samuel to work, and though he wasn’t quite sure what to expect, he said he was ready to pitch in and learn new skills.

“I got the call yesterday letting me know I was going to head out in the morning. So, I got ready, got some sleep and here we are. It’s my first hurricane to go help out, and I’m just ready to help out and see how bad it is.”

This is the third time responding to another co-op in need for Koopmann, who said he was ready to help out once more.  

The work definitely won’t be easy.

“It’s challenging,” Koopmann said. “Hard work. It’s hot. Always wet. But, it gives you a great sense of accomplishment.  You get to go help out fellow Texans, fellow co-ops and brothers in line work just like you.”

Despite the hard work that lay ahead, Koopmann said there’s a great feeling of accomplishment waiting at the end, which he said he enjoys most.
“I enjoy just the experience of helping everybody out and the experience of working with guys from other offices as well as helping some of these young guys that have never been to get that experience under their belt for storm restoration,” he said.

With 150 mph winds as it made landfall right at the Louisiana/Texas border, the hurricane plowed northward as one of the strongest storms ever to hit the Bayou State before it gradually weakened into a tropical storm. Six people were killed as it moved inland, and it knocked out an estimated 880,000 utility customers.

Joey Davis, director for member relations at Jasper-Newton, said Laura left some sizeable damage in his service territory due to high winds and even tornados.

While low-lying areas have experienced flooding, Davis said the majority of the damage they’ve seen was due to the high winds.
“We watched it coming into Louisiana,” he said. “It was probably about 2 or 3 o’clock in morning when  we started seeing the wind starting to affect our southern parts. It started to affect Kirbyville, our corporate headquarters, around 3 or 4 o’clock and with hurricane category two winds were what we were feeling in certain places. We have more than 21,000 without power. We lost transmission, but we were able to keep some of it up in the northern part of our system.  It caused damaging winds and tornadoes, a lot of trees down and broken poles.”

A day after Laura swept through, Davis said he was hearing stories of massive damage in the southern and eastern portions of their service territory on the scale of Hurricane Rita in 2005. Rita  is the measuring stick locals use to gauge hurricane damage in the area, he said, and Jasper-Newton experienced 100 percent outages for that storm. However, he said crews were still working  out toward those areas.

“Our corporate headquarters went out. We were on generator power for a few hours. But we were able to get transmission  back on to our headquarters and our local schools, where we house our crews as they come in to assist with restoration. The need is pretty big right now for our community, especially  Newton County. That’s the east part nearest Louisiana where most of the destruction was at. We’ve done our best to try to clear roads and work with the county just to get an assessment of what kind of disaster and damage we have down there.”

Not only is assisting in the restoration the neighborly thing to do, it’s also part of United’s guiding principles to cooperate among cooperatives, said United CEO Cameron Smallwood.

“One of the things that makes a co-op special is the idea we help when other co-op’s need it most,” Smallwood said. “I’m thinking about the teams from 11 different co-ops from Texas and Oklahoma who came to United’s aid during the surprise February ice storm in 2018 that knocked out power to more than 8,000 members in the western half of our service territory. If it wasn’t for the help those teams offered to us, that restoration  would have taken much more time than it did.

“So it really is our pleasure to help out others during a time of crisis like this. We hope that , with our help and the help of other co-ops , Jasper-Newton Electric Co-op gets  back to serving their members  as quickly as possible.”