Escambia River Electric Cooperative > News > Staying in Touch With You

Staying in Touch With You

Posted on August 16, 2016

You Have an Important Part to Play in Helping EREC Restore Your Power During Outages

Escambia River Electric Cooperative’s outage system uses caller ID technology to quickly identify your account and service location, but it only works if the co-op has your correct phone numbers. No phone number means slower response and repair times.

When you call to report an outage, the cooperative’s automated computer system matches your phone number with your service address. It then references the database to determine which equipment all current outage reports have in common. This allows EREC to determine the location of the outages faster and dramatically decreases power restoration time.

Don’t wait. Please update your phone number with EREC before a storm hits. Here are three easy ways:

Call our office at (850) 675-4521 or (800) 235-3848. Give our member service personnel your correct phone numbers.
Go online to www.erec.com. Click My Account and then Account Profile. Next, click on your account, press continue, then make changes to the phone numbers listed. Finally, press submit. Do this for each account you have with EREC.
Write your phone numbers on your EREC bill stub. Return with your payment to EREC.

When you call the outage number, 1-877-OUT-EREC, and the system has identified your phone number with the outage location, you will hear, “Please wait while we check for outages affecting your area.” That is followed by one of these responses:

If you are the first person to call in the outage, or if the outage has just occurred, you will hear, “We have not received any reports of outages in your area. Please continue your report so that we may bring the problem to the attention of our dispatchers.”
When the outage has just occurred, but dispatchers are informed of the situation, you will hear, “We are aware of outages affecting your area.”
After dispatchers have notified an EREC crew of the outage location, the message will be, “We are aware of outages affecting your area, and a crew has been dispatched to fix the problem.”
When a crew is in the process of making repairs to restore power, you will hear, “We are aware of outages affecting your area, and a crew is onsite working to fix the problem.”

This information will let you know the status of the outage restoration process. Making sure your EREC account information is up-to-date will result in quicker response time to power outages and will keep you better informed.