Crestview is the Okaloosa County seat, but it lives a different storm life than the beach
towns south of it. There is no storm surge this far inland, what reaches Crestview is
wind, rain, and falling timber. The county's
tree canopy is the problem: a tropical system tracking up the Panhandle can snap pines and
hardwoods across miles of overhead line in a single night.
Most of the area is powered by Choctawhatchee
Electric Cooperative (CHELCO), a member-owned co-op rather than a big investor-owned
utility. CHELCO serves a wide, semi-rural footprint of long feeders, and that geography cuts
both ways: it is what makes the lights reliable on a normal Tuesday, and it is what makes
restoration slow when a storm scatters trees across the whole network at once.
That is the real argument for a standby generator up here. The further your home sits from the
substation, out toward Baker, Laurel Hill, Holt, or Milligan, the further down the
restoration queue you tend to land, because crews have to clear and rebuild the line span by
span before they ever reach your meter.
A permanently installed standby generator skips that wait. It senses the outage and restores
power on its own, usually within seconds, and keeps a Crestview home running for as long as
the grid is down, whether that is one summer thunderstorm or a week after a hurricane.
See how installation works →