PSO's tree trimming paying off

Thunderstorms rolled through the Tulsa area Monday afternoon and evening. It was an impressive sight, but it was also impressive what didn't happen. <br/><br/>As News on 6 reporter Steve Berg explains

Tuesday, April 25th 2006, 11:10 am

By: News On 6

Thunderstorms rolled through the Tulsa area Monday afternoon and evening. It was an impressive sight, but it was also impressive what didn't happen.

As News on 6 reporter Steve Berg explains there were relatively few power outages. Not just one, not just two, but 3 rounds of powerful storms hit Tulsa, packing winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour.

"But at any one particular time we only had a few thousand customers out." PSO spokesman Stan Whiteford says most of the electrical work was done Monday night. There were just a few tree crews out mopping up Tuesday morning.

The tree-trimming, while sometimes controversial from a looks standpoint, Whiteford says is doing the job from an electrical standpoint. "We've beefed up our tree-trimming program and added about 100 new tree trimmers and crew so that we could not get behind and start staying up with things a little better than we have in the past."

Another smaller, but still helpful factor is the increasing use of underground cables. It's still just a small part of the system, about 700 miles out of 12,000, but every little bit helps. "We saw 50, 60 mile per hour winds and in the old days, we would have seen considerably more outages in the Tulsa area than we did this time. We take this as a sign that we're on the right track to making the reliability improvements that we're looking to make."

PSO will keep adding underground cables to areas that are hardest to reach, because those are the ones that take the longest to be repaired.