If you were thinking that this spring has been very active for serve weather in our area, you are right! The US National Weather service out of Sioux Falls issued 187 severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings this year as of May 31st. The only year more active since 1986 was 2004 at 299 warnings.

This severe weather caused quite a few outages on our system throughout the month of May. We had blinks or outages on every single substation, and we had over 4,000 total consumer hours out of power. This is the combined time of every outage for every consumer, and the vast majority was weather related.

The May 12th derecho wreaked the most damage on our system by taking down 18 poles and causing over 150 wire breaks.

Our linemen began working as soon as the storm passed through our area, and they were able to restore power to all our meters by 6 pm the following day. Our crews put in a combined 311 hours of overtime after that storm.

B-Y Electric would like to thank all of our members for your patience during the storm restoration, clean-up, and repair. We greatly appreciate all our members!