Tornado damage meets co-op determination
Overcoming devastation from May storms
When times get tough, that’s when the real strength of our co-op family shows up.”
» Morghan Blevins
THE SIX TORNADOES that slammed Kentucky on May 16-17 killed 20 people, injured dozens more and destroyed or heavily damaged thousands of homes and businesses.
Crews from Georgia and fellow Kentucky co-ops helped restore power to more than 110,000 consumer-members statewide.
In southeastern Kentucky’s Laurel County, where 17 people died, the devastation encountered by Jackson Energy Cooperative crews was “hard to fathom,” says Ryan Henderson, vice president of engineering and operations.
“Poles and wires and transformers were just gone, no idea where they were,” Henderson says. “Wire tangled up in trees and debris, cars, you name it.”
With landmarks obliterated, lineworkers relied on service maps to know where to rebuild the system, replacing 165 poles, 125 transformers and 3.3 miles of power lines.
The home of one co-op employee was destroyed, but as staff worked to help their grieving communities, they also counted their blessings.
“One of our employees said, ‘you know, there’s been a lot of tragedies this weekend, but we’ve also heard of a lot of miracles,’” Henderson says.
Thirty miles to the west, South Kentucky RECC’s headquarters in Somerset took a direct hit.
As the co-op’s roof was ripped away, a neighboring business was blown apart, its girders slamming into the co-op drive-thru. Within the reinforced walls of the SKRECC operations center, an overnight dispatcher was receiving damage reports from nearby Russell County when the tornado toppled the co-op’s radio communications tower and knocked out the outage monitoring system.
“The damage meant we didn’t have a system that we could look at,” says Roy Bray, the co-op’s director of operations. “We were working as if it was 50 years ago.”
Acting on instinct and experience, crews began restoring power where they could, with many areas blocked by debris.
“There were just mountains of trees laying across some of the roadways,” Bray says, praising the army of firefighters, highway workers, utility crews and citizens who jumped in to clear the way.
Once crews reached the hardest hit areas, Bray says trees were again piled up “7 or 8 feet deep on top of where the power lines had once stood.”
A snapped Jackson Energy Cooperative pole on Wyan Road in Laurel County indicates the power of the May 16 tornado. Photo: Tim Coyle
With assistance from other co-ops and the state, SKRECC set up a temporary operations center and phone line to accept outage reports. Before engineers determined it was not safe to access the remaining structure, employees in hard hats salvaged critical equipment and records.
Meanwhile, co-op employees kept working and updating members. Within seven days of the disaster, they had restored power to all able to receive it. It is a “testament to the fact that these linemen care about what they’re doing, each other and our members,” Bray says.
“When times get tough, that’s when the real strength of our co-op family shows up,” echoes Morghan Blevins, the co-op’s communications administrator. “It’s not just about getting the work done—it’s about supporting one another through hard times and coming out stronger on the other side. That’s what being part of a co-op is all about.”
SKRECC shifted operations to district offices and opened a Member Services Center in the Somerset Mall. A local bank is accepting bill payments.
Meanwhile, SKRECC remained on schedule for its member appreciation days and annual meeting. Less than one month after the tornado, smiling co-op employees distributed complimentary buckets and lightbulbs and even conducted an election for a co-op board seat.
“I am so proud of our team,” says South Kentucky RECC President and CEO Kevin Newton. “Even with their office space gone, they’ve stayed completely committed to getting things back up and running. It’s not easy, but they’ve kept going, showing what real dedication looks like. It says a lot about the kind of people we have here.”
