Wood County Electric Cooperative (WCEC) is appropriately named. The co-op provides power for the vast stretches of rural Wood County as well as the residents of Quitman. Only the municipalities of Alba, Hawkins, Mineola, and Winnsboro receive their power through other distributers.

Providing power to Wood County means miles and miles of transmission lines – over 5,000 miles of line. Given the rural nature of the county, the heavily-forested topography, the complexity of power transmission, East Texas weather, animal interaction and the occasional man-made accident, keeping the light on in the coffeemaker can be a challenge. 

“Each and every outage is unique,” stated Chief Operating Officer C.H. Campbell, “and all of them are memorable.”  Campbell plays the central role in grid restoration. That effort is guided by a simple tenet: to safely restore power to the greatest number of people in the shortest time possible. 

To understand the process of grid restoration in Wood County it is necessary to describe the power distribution system. 

Although WCEC covers most of Wood County, the co-op’s distribution service area is far larger. It extends from Titus County in the northeast down into Van Zandt County. The co-op’s distribution system is fed by a number of power plants, all outside of the service area.     

The power suppliers feed the WCEC grid at multiple points. These high voltage supply lines are led to 28 distribution substations. Those substations serve a variety of functions in monitoring both grid integrity and power levels. 

Most importantly, the substations send the electricity further on 138,000-volt main distribution transmission lines to individual service or “trap” lines. Transformers reduce the voltage to useable levels, and a trap line reaches a point of interconnection with an individual consumer. The electricity then travels through the consumer’s privately-owned service wiring in the home or business to your coffeemaker.

In Wood County, 13 substations service the local residents. Two substations are dedicated to individual accounts: the Dallas Water Station at Lake Fork and the TransCanada pipeline.

The bottom line is, it is a very complex system which transports a vital but deadly commodity required by society.    

“Maintaining the network is a collaborative effort,” Campbell stated. He explained many of the inputs which factor into restoring power in the event of an outage: investigators are stationed in each of the co-op’s five service regions, consumer reporting assists in identifying the extent of an outage, communications with power suppliers and neighboring co-ops can curb outages, and devices installed on the physical grid itself feed information back to WCEC’s headquarters in Quitman. 

Once an outage does occur, it is up to the 90 WCEC technicians and support personnel to restore the grid. 

“Of course, we hope to design and maintain a distribution system which never suffers an outage, but we know that outages will occur,” noted Campbell. 

This spring has provided two examples of outages which illustrate the varying factors involved in a complex above-ground system. 

The Easter spring storm ripped through the county and caused a wide swath of outages. Straight line winds brought limbs and whole trees down on transmission and service lines. More recently an outage in the Quitman area was caused when a piece of equipment at a power supplier’s installation failed.  The resulting attempts to reroute power to the affected areas was stymied by regularly-scheduled maintenance which prevented the reroute. 

In every case, WCEC decision-makers from Chief Executive Officer Trey Teaff to individual dispatchers and foremen are active placing the correct type and number of linemen to the affected area. The hard work of clearance, restoration and repair then commences in earnest. 

Teaff described the high degree of loyalty among the employees of the co-op, “People who go through long stretches of hard work, away from their families, for the benefit of their neighbors, build a strong sense of camaraderie. To work at a co-op, you have to have a servant’s heart.”

That is exemplified in two characteristics at WCEC. Teaff is only the fourth CEO/general manager since its founding in 1938. Virgil Shaw was the founding manager and was followed by Juan D. Nichols and Debbie L. Robinson.  

Secondly, the co-op values community service. Chief among their community initiatives is the Round-Up program which deposits each customer’s change to a non-profit trust which distributes monies to local non-profit organizations. Since inception in 2017, WCEC has given $304,706 to local non-profit organizations through Round-Up. 

Additionally, the co-op funds a number of scholarships for local students and sponsors students to the East Texas Rural Youth Leadership Seminar each year. 

Keeping the community informed is vital to keeping the county powered-up. Director of Communications Paige Eaton encourages everyone to use the near real-time outage map available on the WCEC.org website. It is updated every three minutes to provide accurate situational awareness.

“Should you experience an outage,” Eaton explained, “the best way to notify us is to use either the high volume phone line (1-866-415-2951) or a text message through the phone number associated with your account.”

The co-op has come a long way since those first poles were set between Quitman and Golden 80 years ago. While WCEC crews are most often seen cutting the 30-foot rights-of-way under transmission lines, it is only a glimpse of the massively-complex system of people and hardware which keep the lights burning.