East River Electric 2020 Annual Report

COVID-19
PANDEMIC:
Responding to
the Crisis
The World Health Organization officially
declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March
11, 2020. That was also around the same
time when the virus emerged locally in
our region.
East River was closely tracking the pandemic’s
spread into our region and took action to implement
our Pandemic Response Plan that exists as part of
our broader Emergency Restoration Plan. Due to
the fluidity of the situation, the leadership team
met several times each week and remained in close
contact to implement and evolve the response plan to
respond to situations as they arose.
“All of our efforts were made to keep our workforce
safe so that we could continue providing our essential
service,” said General Manager Tom Boyko. “I want to
commend the whole electric cooperative family on
their focus to provide our essential service. Without
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electricity, modern society does not function. Every
essential societal function—from hospitals to food
distribution facilities and beyond—requires electricity.
It was essential that we continued as a co-op family
to provide our critical service and proactively position
ourselves to best serve our members through the
pandemic.”
The safety of our workforce has always been a top
priority at East River. Construction, maintenance and
operation of our system continued, but East River
took many steps to protect our employees and ensure
continued reliable service to our membership.
We suspended all non-essential business travel and
restricted all non-essential outside visitors from our
facilities. We also ramped up cleaning and sanitization
across our facilities. East River established a backup
system operations area and isolated a team
of operators to that area. Through a revised work