How to Report An Outage

During a loss of electricity, members of United Cooperative Services should call their area office and report the outage:

If the outage occurs after hours or on a holiday, please contact your local United office. Your phone call will be routed to our 24 hour/day dispatch center.

Knowing your account number or the meter number affected by the outage will go a long way in helping United crews restore power as quickly as possible.

During the day, customer service representatives at each United office handle outage calls person-to-person and manually input data into our computer system in order to inform the crews about an outage. However, in an effort to be able to handle a number of calls with minimal personnel at night and on the weekends, many after-hour's calls are managed by an automated service and reports are controlled by United's outage management software. This automated system works in two basic steps:

1. Using a caller identification feature, our automated outage management software links the phone number from which the call was placed to a member's specific account information. If working properly, the linking process will immediately bring up the member's name, home address, account number, a list of meters on the account, meter numbers and map location of the potential outage.
2. If that phone number is not recognized because the member is calling from another location or a cell phone, members are instructed to leave a detailed message about their outage.

By knowing the account number associated with the meter affected by the outage, members can help United crews report to the correct outage area faster and fix the problem quicker.

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