JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – JEA did not wait until hurricane season started to have the supplies needed to respond to an emergency.
Preparation started a long time ago to fully stock a warehouse with all of the critical materials.
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News4JAX had the opportunity to go inside JEA’s warehouse on the Westside Friday. The entire space is 100,000 square feet, and it holds about $7 million worth of storm stock.
The warehouse has more than 580 items, all playing a role in helping restore power as quickly as possible if there is ever an emergency, hurricane, or really bad storm.
Rodney Lovgren and Jessica Keeler, both with JEA, said getting this warehouse 100% stocked was paramount.
“When a named event comes through or we mobilize, we have four tractor-trailers that we deploy two staging areas and that allows us to be able to respond immediately for restoration,” Lovgren said.
Keeler said the more they have on hand, the faster JEA can act in case of an emergency.
“The faster that we can get our crews deployed and get restoration out to our customers,” Keeler said.
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Among the materials in stock are:
- Underground cables
- Above and underground transformers, some that you would see on top of a pole
- Large green boxes you can see sometimes in a yard or outside a business
- A mix of cables, brackets and insulators
- Pole line hardware
Keeler and Lovgren said it took about a year and a half to get this warehouse to this standard as some supplies were on backorder for that long.
“This program has been going on for multiple years prior to this. But we have beeped it up over the last three or four years with all of the supply chain disruptions. It is nearly doubled in size than what it was pre-2020,” Lovgren said.
Keeler said, however, some of those materials have a shelf life.
“With transformers, we want to make sure that everything is good from an oil and mechanical standpoint. For cable, some cable is stored outdoors, and there can be issues with the wood reels being damaged because of weather conditions, which intern can damage the cable. We want to monitor the materials to make sure that we’re ready to go and there aren’t any unplanned surprises when we actually need to utilize it,” Keeler said.
No matter if it’s getting power back on for a hospital, first responders, businesses, or homes, JEA said crews need to be ready at any time. Keeler said having these supplies available “improves response time and being able to restore power to the community.”