April 2023

Dustin Tripp

Cooperative Success

As you know, the Cooperative’s service area, in the past, has experienced some major storms including ice storms, tornadoes, excessive straight-line winds and severe thunderstorms.  These storms typically result in outages caused by downed trees, broken tree limbs and fallen poles.  In this article, I would like to take an opportunity to express my sincere appreciation for the Cooperative employees that not only work to restore your electric service during these severe weather events but who also dedicate their lives to serving the electric cooperative members every day.

April 18th has been designated as Lineman Appreciation Day.  This is a day to honor all of the hardworking men and women in their role to build, maintain and restore electric service that powers our communities.  These are the employees that come to work, day or night, rain or shine, to make sure that all members have access to electricity.  When the storms roll in and our communities take cover, these employees pick up the phone, grab their gear and go out into the storms to restore your service.    In addition to their role of restoring service during severe weather events, your Cooperative linemen also work every day to build and maintain over 3,500 miles of distribution system in SouthEastern’s territory.  The linemen perform much of their work while the systems are still energized so that members will not be without electricity while performing necessary maintenance.

In addition to our linemen, SouthEastern would also like to recognize and show appreciation to all employees that make our Cooperative such a success.  From the front office employees like our Customer Service Representatives that answer your calls and provide the needed information, to the engineering personnel that design the energy systems for safe and reliable service, to the dispatch personnel that maintain effective communications with employees, to the accounting personnel who ensure our vendors are paid and track accounts receivable, to our payroll personnel ensuring that employees are paid accurately and timely, to the forestry personnel that perform vegetation management to increase reliability, to the management team that manages every day activities – SouthEastern salutes all of you for your hard work and dedication to our Cooperative and the members it serves. Your Cooperative employees are doing an outstanding job for the membership and we hope you will join us in thanking our lineman and all employees for the outstanding service they provide.  Your Cooperative remains committed to finding new and better ways to serve its members. Your Cooperative will continue to work diligently to improve and enhance the level of service and reliability that you receive while keeping rates as affordable as possible.

See you next month and as always, “We’ll keep the lights on for you.”