With TEP’s 99.9 percent reliability, power outages are rare. But when service interruptions do occur, TEP recognizes they can be a big inconvenience.

We’re taking steps to improve the experience for our customers by improving our outage map and training more employees to support our field crews as they work as safely and as quickly as possible to restore power.

Updating the Outage Map

Big updates were made to the outage map to provide customers with more information regarding both planned and unplanned outages.

Earlier this year, we installed a new counter that lists active outages and affected customers. Now it’s easy to see what portion of our more than 450,000 customers are out of service.

Our map now includes the following details:

• Active outages
• Planned outages for system maintenance
• 24-hour outage history
• Any public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) – proactive outages that may be initiated in limited locations during extreme weather to reduce wildfire risks.

“We ask our customers for feedback after they’ve experienced an outage, and they told us that one of the things that helps settle their minds is to know why the outage occurred,” said Sandra Holland, TEP’s Principal Data Analyst for Customer Insights. While that information has been shared in real-time text messages and follow-up emails, it’s now shown on the map as well.

“This was a wonderful collaborative effort across many departments to make sure our customers are informed.”

To ensure you receive our outage updates, confirm your contact information by logging in or registering at tep.com/login or by calling our Customer Care team at 520-623-7711.

Customers can view the outage map online or on their mobile app. Download on Google Play or Apple.

Training for Trouble

TEP trained more employees to handle unpredictable storms ahead of the summer storm season, making sure we could provide quality customer service and reliability when it’s needed most.

To help us prepare for extreme weather, all our Journeyman Linemen were prepped to respond to “trouble” calls, which are any outages or electric problems, like flickering lights.

Such calls are usually handled by a limited number of qualified Troublemen who essentially serve as TEP’s first-responders. But during major storms and outages, the number of incidents sometimes exceeded their capacity to respond before they were required to clock-out under federal fatigue-management requirements.

“With fatigue management, our Troublemen sometimes all time-out at the same time,” said Corey Brown, Transmission and Distribution Manager. “Now, we have Journeymen trained to carry out that work. This will greatly help our customers.”

Now, all TEP Journeyman Linemen can be assigned to fill in for Troublemen. The change more than doubled the potential deployment.