Woodruff Electric Cooperative Corporation

I'm giving 4 stars when I only want to give 1. The power is always going out where I live. When I say always I mean almost every single week multiple times a week. It messes up my sleep, my work schedule, and food has spoiled in my refrigerator because of it. The 4 stars are for the lineman who work their tails off trying to get the power back on. The 4 stars are for the receptionists who always answer the phone and patiently assist me in reporting an outage. Everything else about the company I give 1 star! That's it! 1 single star. I don't know who at Woodruff Electric is responsible for such unstable conditions of the electrical grid, but they should really try to improve it. I understand that harsh storms knock the power out, and people can hit telephone poles, but is this the cause every week? NO. The power goes out as I said nearly every single week multiple times. Often times when it goes out there's not even a storm. Sometimes there's just a tad mist of rain, guess what, it goes out. Other times there's a small gust of wind, what happens, it goes out. Then you have the night time outages that wake everyone from their sleep, and the weather is usually completely still when that happens. We have to reset our clocks on stove, refrigerator, and microwave at least 1-3 times per week. I'm not exaggerating. This needs to be addressed. I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy, I'm just tired of the power going out!! Everytime it goes out, we report it, and wait. It usually takes an hour minimum for the power to be restored. I get it, these things take time, but should this be happening that frequently and taking that long to fix every single time?! When our power goes out, we can go into downtown Des Arc (we live on the outskirts) and rest assured that their power is still on. It NEVER goes out. Why?? Because they are using Entergy!! That's why!! I've used so many power companies over the years: Conway Corp, Entergy, Southwest, Arkansas Electric, Today's Electric, and more. I never had this experience with those companies. With conway Corp a pole was knocked down ONE time and the power was fixed promptly, after living there for 3 years it never happened nor did it go out again. My sincerest apologies for ranting, and I truly mean no disrespect, but I hope for the sake of the company that this can be rectified. EDIT: 6 months later and I will say that the power situation seems to have improved, we've had significantly fewer outages even during storms. HOWEVER, despite the infrequent loss of power, we have been experiencing random outages. Our power has gone out & surged about 4 times in the past week...3 of those times were in the middle of the day, not a cloud in the sky, and no wind whatsoever. 1 of those outages happened during a bad thunderstorm in the middle of the night. It's worth noting that each time the power has come back on almost immediately...that's where I see the improvement. Unfortunately, during one of those random daytime surges, our computer got fried! The motherboard bought the farm! I am angry. It would have been less upsetting if I knew the outage happened due to something inevitable, but there was no storm...nothing caused it. It seemed as if Woodruff Electric was doing some sort of routine test on the grid. If that is the case, I plead with Woodruff to PLEASE notify your customers if you plan on switching the power off. A simple text alert when power is likely to be shut off would suffice. My computer is destroyed, and I feel it could have been avoided. I have surge protectors, but they aren't 100% effective all the time! Maybe ya'll have improved, but if the power goes off for no reason 3 out of 4 times, I don't like those odds. Luckily I didn't lose my data from my computer.