Denver Shartzer, left, looks onward as Chris Smith points to a map inside the Glasgow Electric Plant Board’s “war room” on Friday, March 3, 2023. The GEPB was just one of the many power companies in southcentral Kentucky responding to widespread power outages on Friday.
(BRENNAN CRAIN/WCLU NEWS)
By BRENNAN D. CRAIN, WCLU News
GLASGOW — A quiet office Friday turned to a turbulent operation as staff at the Glasgow Electric Plant Board began responding to outages and downed electric infrastructure.
Bands of severe weather made their way across the region Friday morning and brought heavy downpours and some thunderstorms. After those storms cleared, the havoc began for local emergency officials and power companies like the Glasgow EPB and neighboring Farmers RECC.
“There is order in it, and it takes experience to understand it,” said Dawn Tiedemann, a 25-year veteran of the GEPB staff who was overseeing much of the communications inside the utility’s dispatch center on Friday.
Varying alerts continued to sound through the room while we were inside. Those noises – though meaningless to a common bystander – signaled staff to certain problems. The phone never stopped ringing – even when the power went out in the building for a short time.
Tickets were scattered across a large table with names of callers, phone numbers and their reports from around the community. Those were being grouped by area and in order of importance, Tiedemann said. The hub is best described as the utility’s first-line of communication with the public and the organizer of that communication.
Just a few doors down from the communications center is what employees at the GEPB call “the war room,” where decisions about the power grid are made.
“In there, you need to be quiet. If you don’t have a purpose in that room, you might want to keep your distance,” said Aaron Russell, the GEPB marketing and communications director. “Those that are in there working working very hard and are handling very serious situations – opening and closing switches to make sure power is safely transferred back to certain pieces of equipment and that nobody gets hurt in the process.”
The GEPB has a series of power supplies and generators in the event of a power outage at their building, but those resources are not indefinite, Russell said. The power blinked while we were in the dispatch center but computers stayed on and the connection to the public remained vital.
The GEPB urged anyone with information to notify them via phone at (270) 651-8341 or online at Facebook.com/glasgowepb. Crews were working to restore power but continued to face set-backs as winds kept
A high wind warning remained in effect Friday through 9 p.m.
This story was written and filed from the Glasgow EPB’s headquarters at 101 Mallory Drive in Glasgow. Brennan Crain spent much of the afternoon there reporting on various outages.
