A long work week blends into an even longer weekend for Chuck Hardin, Director of Engineering Technology, with Craighead Electric, when tornadoes tore through six states overnight on Friday, December 10th, 2021, including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.
“As of 1:00 am, all power has been restored to our membership. Thank you all for your patience during this process. A big thanks to all the lineman, dispatchers, and office personnel for their work during the restoral process”. This Facebook post on December 13th, 2021, marked the end of many hours of work from linemen and other utility team members who went into action to restore power to thousands of co-op members.
Craighead Electric services 31,000 meters across seven counties in Northeast Arkansas. The Co-Op was incorporated in 1937 as a part of the Rural Electrification Administration, also known as REA, which was created during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 to expand electrical opportunities to rural areas.
Chuck is no stranger to adapting to difficult situations, and his efforts with the Craighead team during this recent crisis are emblematic of why he is considered a Partner Software hero. Craighead utilizes numerous Partner solutions, including Field Design, Distribution Inspection, Partner Mobile, Mobile Outage, and Automated Live Publish.
Chuck recently sat down with us to share stories of his experiences using these solutions.
Craighead’s relationship with Partner Software started in 2010 as an alternative to licensing AutoCAD in all of their trucks. They chose Partner Software because the Map Viewer included an AutoCAD translation function. Success with Partner Maps led to an eventual purchase of Field Design and Distribution Inspection, and in the following years the two companies have exchanged numerous modifications and updates to further enhance these tools in the field.
Hardin explains, “Every time we use Partner, we find new ways to use it.” He goes on to add how Craighead has customized the Distribution Inspection software. “On our front end, we’ve customized DI to have a storm damage checkmark, replace pole, cross-arm broke, conductor down, right of way needed, pretty much the pie chart y’all use in Damage Assessment.” “Plus, we have fiber down, fiber cut, and fiber enclosure damaged.”
Another customization that has great value in terms of updating the co-op members during an outage are sharable overview maps. Chuck elaborates, “We’ve also created a media preference in Partner that really strips the map down to TIGER information, road information, city information, shows where our trucks are located through AVL, and it shows the inspection overview. You can see where the crews are working, and you put that out of Facebook and social media, and it’s something anybody who’s looking at it can understand.”
A key distinction of this custom mapset is it gives more details than a standard outage map, which would show where the outages are, but not the damage. Chuck’s custom mapset gives more details about specific items such as a broken pole, or downed lines.
“We’ve done a ridiculous amount of stuff”, says Chuck about Partner Software in general, but this could also apply to the heavy lifting Craighead accomplished with Partner Software during the recent storm. As the weekend comes to a close Craighead Electric is still on the job assessing cleanup even after the power returns to rural Arkansas, but thanks to Chuck’s team, and his clever customizations, this disaster has become more manageable.
Partner Software’s platform is very customizable and offers solutions for a variety of utility needs. Let us know how we can help you push the boundaries with Partner Software.