Message to our community
We wanted to send you a message to share the approach we’re taking to the current situation. Please be assured that we are well-prepared for any additional risk from the re-emergence of Covid-19. We are working to our pandemic plan and have spent the last few days refining our approach to working in our community going forward.
As we move forward, we will be continuing with our work, which may be challenging for some of our community, but necessary.
As an essential service provider it is critical that we continue to carry out our works programme to provide safe and reliable power to our community. If the last lockdown showed us anything, it was how crucial power is to our ‘new normal’ and our lives today, as we rely on it to learn and work from home and make our lives comfortable.
We learnt a lot in lockdown around how we can work differently to maintain the health and safety of our teams. Most of those practices, around safe hygiene protocols, increased levels of personal protection equipment, stringent working practices such as working in small team bubbles, using dedicated vehicles and more we continued even as we progressed down the alert levels. We know we can continue to work safely in our community and ensure a reliable and safe power supply, regardless of the alert level.
As one of the largest employers in the area, and a major user of local contractors, small businesses and of local suppliers, it is imperative we also continue our works programme to keep our community working and the local economy going. The cost on our community by discontinuing our work programme would simply be too high along with any ongoing effects on the reliability of the power supply. We need to get on with the job for our community, our employees, our local businesses and our local economy.
You will see more of our crews out working as they get on the job of building new network, maintaining and upgrading existing network and keeping our power supply flowing. The demand for power is increasing year on year and so too are the number of power users in our area as Franklin continues to grow. We must continue to roll out our infrastructure investment and plans to future-proof our network.
While we continue with our work, we will need to conduct some shutdowns for the safety of our people and our community. We have adapted and changed our work practices however to have less impact on our community while so many of you are working and schooling at home. We will schedule the shutdowns each day wherever possible from one area to another to limit the impact on households and businesses each week regardless of the alert level.
Like before, we ask you to please maintain a two-metre distance from our teams. If you feel unwell and require a crew to attend an outage please advise us before we attend so appropriate safety measures can be taken. It is critical that we all work to keep our highly-trained crews safe to maintain our region’s power supply.
Please be aware that due to the safety protocols such as working in our small team ‘bubbles’ and social distancing, some outages may take longer to be resolved.
Our reception and offices are closed to visitors and customers while the vast majority of our office-based employees are working from home. The best way for the community to report a fault and to stay up-to-date if the power goes out is via the app – type app.countiespower.com in your smartphone internet browser now. More information on our safety precautions and working practices can be found at www.countiespower.com/covid-19. For information on our shutdowns visit the app or our website – www.countiespower.com/shutdowns.
Please call us for all enquiries on 0800 100 202, check our website www.countiespower.com or our app.
We’re back working to keep our people in work, our local economy going, our infrastructure investment on track and your power flowing. We thank you for your understanding.
The team at Counties Power