Arrington
Nelson County, Virginia

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative Prepares for Winter Storm
February 4, 2010 – 2 PM

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC) is preparing to respond to power outages that may result from the winter storm that is predicted to arrive in Virginia on Friday morning. Line trucks are fitted with tire chains and the linemen are standing by. This outage advisory provides information for the media as well as your listeners and viewers.

Please keep in mind that a number of factors will determine what impact the weather will have on electric service in the CVEC service territory:
Heavy, wet snow or ice will cause more damage to trees and adjacent powerlines that lighter colder snow
Steep terrain and saturated soil increase the chance of tree root release which might cause the entire tree to fall into a powerline
Brisk winds combined with the preceding conditions compound potential damage
Total accumulation can impede on-road and off-road travel for repair crews and delay response time and restoration efforts.

While CVEC hopes that the impact of the storm will be mild, we offer the following contact and outage reporting information:
· CVEC Members should call 800-367-2832 to report an outage through our automated outage management system. The CVEC Outage Management System will combine every reported outage into a predictive computer model so that CVEC will be able to dispatch crews to where they may do the most good.
· Members may also report an outage online at the CVEC website. (www.forcvec.com).
· Service restoration estimates are rarely available during the first few hours of the outage until crews can arrive at the fault location and begin repair efforts.

Cooperative members may learn about repair efforts:
· Through reports by the local media
· On the new CVEC Outage Web Map page that highlights service areas with known outages and provides details about the number of affected household and restoration progress. A direct link is available from the CVEC Website.
· Using a cell phone or computer to visit the CVEC Facebook page. (www.facebook.com/MyCVEC)