Duke Energy Indiana president thanks customers for their patience during recent widespread outages

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Dear Editor:

While many communities in our Indiana service territory are still recovering from recent severe weather and historic flooding, we wanted to pause to say thank you.

Thank you to our customers for their patience during storm-related outages. Thank you to our lineworkers and support personnel in the field who immediately traveled to the hardest hit areas of our service territory and navigated challenging conditions to ensure that power was restored as quickly as possible. Thank you to the first responders and local leaders for assisting in communicating effectively with our customers.

These storms came in waves beginning Aug. 11, affecting more than 100,000 customers. We restored power to the vast majority who could receive service by Aug. 15 – before another round of severe weather hit the next day. We restored flooded substations in Connersville, Hagerstown, and Cambridge City within 24 hours of the water receding.

Looking back, we learned that the investments we’ve been making in something called self-healing technology had a significant impact on reducing our outage numbers. This innovative technology – which quickly and remotely reroutes power to where it’s needed – prevented more than 8,800 interruptions to customers’ power, saving them about 17,000 hours of outage time.

Again, thank you to everyone impacted. We know this storm damage has caused hardship for many Hoosiers. To help our communities begin to recover, we’ve so far distributed a total of more than $50,000 in emergency funding. And we’ll continue to show up when we are needed most.

Stan Pinegar
President, Duke Energy Indiana