CEO’s Message: Weathering the Storm

June 2024

Most Floridians don’t need to be reminded of the risks that hurricane season poses. Throughout the year we enjoy plentiful sunshine and a temperate climate and, in return, we know that there will be a few months when we need to prepare for torrential down-pours and impossibly strong winds.

At this time last year, we hadn’t yet been hit by Hurricane Idalia. We couldn’t have known that just two months later, over 28,000 SVEC consumer-members would find them-selves without power and our system would have sustained the most damage in its history. In all, the repairs took the combined effort of thousands of workers and eight days to restore power to the vast majority of our system.

The speed and scale of that response was thanks to two key fac-tors. The first is the cooperative principle that calls on co-ops to help each other in moments of need. Our crews worked hard when Idalia tore through our area, but they never would have been able to handle all the work in front of them without the help of others who came to our rescue.

As a cooperative, we can accept that help gratefully, knowing that soon enough we’ll have the chance to return the favor. This commitment to mutual aid is strong among cooperatives, and I can’t tell you how much peace of mind it brings us to know SVEC always will have a helping hand if we need it.

The second factor is our own preparation. We work hard throughout the year — not just when hurricane season arrives — to make our system stand up stronger to the abuse of a major storm.

Even when a storm like Idalia does unprecedented damage, the response plans we have in place are a lifeline. Who knows how long it would have taken to organize food, shelter and local guidance for visiting crews with-out the cool heads and careful planning of our whole cooperative team.

Over the years, we’ve added more resources to our arsenal to respond to outages even faster and more effectively. The storm yard we built at our headquarters in 2021 has certainly been an asset as a base for visiting crews, while the ease of reporting and checking the status of outages by text message helps our crews respond faster than ever.

We do everything in our power to make sure our system is prepared for storms, but it is just as important that each of our members takes time to protect themselves and their loved ones. That’s why we have once again put together this hurricane prepara-tion guide for our consumer-members. I hope each of you will take some time to look through it before the storm clouds gather. When they do, you can trust SVEC will be ready to act.