February 2007

Working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit, is the definition of the word Cooperative. The electric cooperative movement begin in the 1930s, as a result of neighbors working with neighbors to bring electricity to America’s rural landscape.

Even today, electric cooperatives are well known for working together in times of crises. Crews have been sent all over the country to help out after major storms, and have been on the receiving end of such help.

It’s understandable that power outages are frustrating. That is why we work hard to minimize the number of power outages that occur on our system. Unfortunately, every utility is going to experience outages at some point in time. The outage time for CWEMC in 2006 was less than 2 hours per customer. This means your cooperative provided you with reliable electricity 99.9 percent of the time during the year 2006.

It is assured to you that our top priority is to provide all of our member-owners with reliable service; we also assure you that our system for reporting power outages is done in the quickest and most efficient manner so we can restore your power. If you have called in a power outage and the system says it does not recognize your number, please call in during regular working hours and give us a phone number that the automated outage reporting system will recognize.  This will aid in our ability to restore your power during evenings, weekends and holidays.