Under heavy criticism by members that are saying they’ve been left in the dark too long, Verdigris Valley Electric Cooperative officials are promising a phone system upgrade and are now speaking to specific areas in Rogers County that continue to be without power this morning.

Lack of communication from VVEC, complaints that residents are not seeing trucks in their area, or that there are no poles visibly down in neighborhoods still without power are among issues cited as causing the most concern to those served by the member-owned rural cooperative.

“We’ve got additional crews in this morning,” said VVEC spokesperson Kathy Calico early Tuesday. “We’re hoping to get more specific reports on the areas they’re working and possibe dates for restoration of service after these crews are all assigned. We want the subdivisions in Rogers County that we’ve been getting calls on to know they have not been forgotten.”

Calico has communicated with the Progress regularly in an attempt to provide information to members who haven’t been able to get through on the phone lines. She said VVEC understands much of members’ frustration stems a lack of information and an inability to talk to a VVEC service representative about outages.

The rural cooperative services a five-county area and experienced what officials describe as a devastating amount of storm damage to the electric delivery system, including a downed feeder line from Grand River Dam Authority.

“GRDA’s feeder 13 that runs from Collinsville to Prue took a lot of damage. That is a transmission source for Verdigris Valley Electric and that line is a power supply to feed a lot of Verdigris Valley meters,” said Justin Alberty, GRDA spokesman. “They continue to make progress on it. They anticipate energizing part of it today, and getting a lot of poles up to energize the rest of it by the end of this week. We lost about 55 structures on this.”

Alberty said he did not know which specific VVEC meters are supplied through GRDA’s transmission line.

Regardless of the cause, the loss of power to thousands of Rogers County homes and businesses has resulted in an unprecedented number of phone calls to the cooperative’s single call line.

“It was already in next year’s work schedule to upgrade the phone system,” said Randy Riddle, manager of operations for VVEC. “But the schedule has been accelerated. It’s going to be upgraded as soon as we can get it done now.”

Calico said VVEC is trying to answer phone calls.

“We have at least 20 people here to answer calls,” said Calico. “There are eight lines. On those lines an employee will pick up immediately and that line is freed up once it answers. We have the employees there picking up the calls.”

The high volume of incoming calls answered found many getting only a busy signal as they attempted to report outages or ask questions about restoration times.

“The issue is really that no matter how many lines we had, the call volume that is coming in means a number of people will get a busy signal,” said Calico.

Calico said the cooperative is also working to upgrade their Web site which was being reconstructed when the storm hit. She said many members have requested the option of logging in to report outages since they have access to the Web at work even though they are without power at home.