Squirrels and Trees Cause Numerous Outages in April

As April has ended, our operations staff hopes that outages will reduce in number. Of the 29 outages that occurred in April, almost half of these were caused by animals and trees.

We track outages and calculate outage indices that are widely used by the utility industry. CAIDI (Customer Average Interruption Duration Index) is the average length of outage for each customer that is interrupted has fallen from about 40 minutes in 2006 to less than 20 minutes so far in 2007. The SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) is the average minutes interrupted per customer the the year has fallen from 110 minutes in 2006 to around 75 minutes today.

We initiated a Distribution Reliability Initiative in 2004 to improve system reliability using advanced techniques used by larger utilities. We will continue to work to reduce the number of outages and their duration for all customers.