Municipal Electric Systems of Oklahoma (MESO) announces that Altus Power was named for outstanding achievement in the association’s annual Electric Operations and Safety Competition. Altus was recognized in the category for cities over 10,000 population.

Altus was accredited for outstanding distribution construction standards, good customer service, and very low margin of customer service disturbances. Altus employees meet the requirements of their work with professionalism and safety due to employer efforts. These efforts include four years of rigorous field experience and testing for each line worker before he acheves journey lineworker status. In addition, employees do safety reveiws before each job and attend monthly training and safety sessions in addition to other training provided by the utility.

The time frame for the award was for calendar year 2008. Altus scored well in reliability with crews normally respondeing to and correcting a customer outage within 60 minutes. By having local ownership of the electic system and crews located withing one mile of most customers, residents in Altus don’t wait long for electric service crews to respond to problems.

Altus maintained an Average System Availability Index (ASAI) for the year of 99.992% meaning that the average customer head pwoer for more than 99.99% of the time. This meant the average meter in Altus lost power for only 45 mnutes out of the 8,760 hours in the year.

MESO General Manager Shane Woolbright presented the award to Altus Power.

“Altus Power has demonstrated a continuous effort in the past decade to be the highest quality public power system,” he said.

“This is evidenced by such actions as training of employees in system preventive maintenance and having employee development programs to prevent problems from overvoltage and overcurrent. Good tree trimming practices play a big role in reliability as well,” said Woolbright.

Altus Electric Superintendent Dan Scott said that although he was glad Altus Power received the award this year, he expects them to receive it again next year, as well.

“We’ve been putting forth the extra effort, adding more guards and what not. Our new transmissions and new substarion should help us to get closer to that 100 mark. So we ought to do a better job next year,” said Scott.

Woolbright said that Altus Power has adopted construction standards and employee training standards that are superior, which has resulted in the outstanding reliability Altus citizens receive and the presentation of the award.

MESO is an electric utility trade association representing cities in Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas. The association’s member utilities provide non-profit electric services to some 700,000 people in the three states.