Restoring Power to Your Home
WPS always strives to restore power safely and as quickly as possible.
- Being Prepared for Outages
- Assessing the Situation
- Getting Your Power Back On
- What You Should Know: Before Turning the Power Back On
Being Prepared for Outages
Storms can come quickly and cause wide spread power outages. That's why we prepare in advance when severe weather threatens our area — making sure equipment is working and supplies are stocked. We track the path of storms to identify areas that may be affected. We also determine if additional assistance may be needed from contractors or neighboring utilities.
Assessing the Situation
The safety of the public and our employees is always our first priority. The first step to ensuring safety is to locate downed power lines and make sure electricity is no longer flowing through the wires. You should always assume that downed power lines are energized and dangerous. Consider any object touching lines energized as well.
Getting Your Power Back On
Typically, WPS attempts to restore power as follows.
- Emergency and Essential Services - Efforts to restore power to agencies that protect the health and safety of the public receive top priority. These agencies include hospitals, police departments, fire departments, water treatment facilities and pumping stations.
- Transmission Lines, Substations and Distribution Lines - Transmission lines carry electricity from generating stations to substations. The substations then reduce the high-voltage power from the transmission lines for use in homes. Distribution lines carry the electricity from the substation to neighborhoods. Repairing damage to these components is necessary to restore power to our customers.
- Service Lines - Repairs are then made to service lines to individual homes. This is the most time-consuming part of the restoration process.
After a power outage, if you notice that your neighbor's power is back on but yours is not, please call 800-450-7240. There may be a problem with your individual service line meter.
As always, it's our goal to restore power as safely and as soon as possible. However, please be aware that we cannot reattach the electric service line until all damaged equipment is repaired. Learn more in What You Should Know: Before Turning The Power Back On.