Cooperative personnel respond to outage calls 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. Members should call 804-333-3621 or 800-243-2860 to report outages. The Cooperative's main objective during widespread outages is to restore service to the greatest number of members in the shortest time. The power must be restored in the sequence shown below because individual services cannot receive electricity until all previous steps are completed. Individuals who depend on electricity to operate life support systems should notify Northern Neck Electric Cooperative before an emergency strikes. These accounts will be given a critical status; however, these individuals should make plans for alternate sources of power or lodging in the event of an electrical outage.

Service Restoration Steps:

1. Transmission lines -- these supply power to one or more substations.
2. Substations -- depending on the location, could affect over 1,000 members.
3. Main distribution lines -- serve a portion of members from each substation.
4. Tap lines -- serve a smaller group of members off the distribution line.
5. Problems affecting individual members.

Things to Do If Your Power Goes Off

1. Check your fuses or circuit breakers in your service box panel. If necessary, replace any fuses or reset the circuit breakers. If some of your lights work, the trouble may be with your electric service and you should contact an electrician.
2. Check with your neighbors to see if they are also out of power. This will help determine if the trouble is caused by the transformer serving you or if there is a line outage.
3. Call Northern Neck Electric Cooperative at 804-333-3621 or toll free at 800-243-2860 as soon as possible to report your power failure or any other unusual problems such as blinking lights, a downed power line, trees on the line, broken poles, limbs on the lines, etc. Be sure to give the name your account is listed in, your account number and your telephone number.
4. Keep trying to get through. Whenever there is a widespread power outage, telephone lines may be very busy with incoming calls.