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Choptank Assists Large Rappahannock Power Outage 

On December 15 of last year a bad ice storm rolled through the Virginia mountains and coated trees, roads and power lines with heavy amounts of ice. The ice storm hit the territory of our fellow co-op, Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. The next day, 1,900 members were without power as a result of more than 120 separate outage events. 
On arrival, Rappahannock field teams had discovered more than 20 broken poles and countless downed lines. Veteran lineworkers commented that this was the worst ice they had ever worked through. Concentrated mostly in the mountainous areas of Warren County, many of the damaged sites were difficult to reach. Crews had to manually carry heavy equipment into deep forests and up steep terrain. 
A call came through that a fellow co-op needed help. Lineworkers Dean Samuel Jr. and Mason Johnson of Choptank Electric Cooperative took that call. Volunteering their expertise and their weekend they stepped up, and within hours they were in the Virginia mountains hard at work. As cooperatives we serve our members most effectively by working together. Team work is a co-op principal that we stick to and our team showed a fine example of how to do just that.
At the height of the restoration efforts, there were as many as 100 field workers working to restore Rappahannock’s members power and we are proud that Choptank Electric Cooperative stepped up and assisted in the effort.

"We got the call Friday around 10 a.m. that Rappahannock needed some help. We packed up and met Tom Simpson in Denton to get the information we needed for the trip. We headed to their Front Royal office by 3 p.m. and went straight to work. Working in a town called Linden, Va., we worked on top of a mountain, they called it Blue Mountain. We worked into the night, clearing trees and downed lines caused from the ice storm. The first day we worked on their three-phase lines and on the second day we started on their single-phase lines and services in the same locations. We finished up late Saturday night with all their members being restored, and returned home Sunday morning."

- Mason Johnson, Apprentice Lineman