A rural Vermont utility crew confronts a surprise outage, and a changing climate
Erica Heilman, producer of Rumble Strip, profiled WEC for VPR broadcast
Published by Vermont Public Radio | By Erica Heilman | April 29, 2022
“Last week, there was a storm of wet heavy snow in areas throughout Vermont, with power outages all around the state. Independent producer Erica Heilman stopped by the Washington Electric Co-op to find out what it sounds like from the inside.”
“I think a lot of them [members] still kind of remember how the co-op came about, you know, serving those who no one else wanted to. That’s why we’re here . . . We realize that what we’re doing isn’t so much just the big conglomerate of somebody trying to make a dollar. We’re trying to provide a service to rural Vermont, or Vermonters, you know.”
– Amos Turner, Construction Foreman
“There is a learning curve. I think people who move to Vermont … they like the quality of Vermont, the ruralness. But I think a lot of people tend to fall back to where they came from. And they want to see those big city kinds of things, you know, that just don’t exist in Vermont.”
– Dave Kresock, Director of Engineering & Operations
“We’re simultaneously occupying a very old kind of stodgy business on one hand, and then the other hand, trying to adapt and make it possible to do all the things we want electricity to do for us, particularly given the threat of climate change.”
– Louis Porter, General Manager