Tideland EMC and Duke Energy will have to conduct an emergency planned outage this morning to replace a joint use pole that was broken during an early morning traffic accident. The outage is expected to last 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

Once Duke personnel and equipment are in place we will issue at least a 10 minute warning before the start of the outage.

Because temperatures are so low today, restoring power after repairs are complete could be challenging without your help. Therefore, we ask that you turn off all of your home's individual circuit breakers with the exception of one for indoor lights or a radio and leave them off until power has been back on for 15 minutes. Then turn individual breakers back on over the next 15 to 30 minute period. This will help prevent an overload of co-op equipment including individual transformers that could lead to an unplanned power outage.

We thank you in advance for your assistance during this unfortunate event.