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Stan Whiteford with the Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO) tells Bartlesville Radio that the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has rescinded its Energy Emergency Alert Level 3 declaration.

Whiteford said Oklahoma has never seen an EEA 3 declared in its history until Monday morning. He said that meant that the SPP was requesting them to shut down power for some area residents for up to an hour to conserve the power supply in the region.

Whiteford said the hope is that the region can maintain this status for the next several days until the fuel and power supplies normalize in the Southwest Power Pool.

In the meantime, Whiteford would kindly ask all PSO customers to do what they can in their efforts to conserve electricity. Whiteford said that might look like backing your thermostat by a couple degrees or by avoiding the use of big appliances 

PSO shut off power throughout its footprint so not one area would experience a huge bulk of outages at one time. According to PSO's outage map, there were over just 11,300 in the area, including a handful of outages in the Nowata area. Whiteford said there were planned interruptions in Tulsa, Lawton, McAlester, Shidler, and Inola as well. He said they only performed one planned outage when SPP rescinded its EEA 3 declaration.

Whiteford said we're still in kind of a tight spot, but for now, they're no longer being asked to interrupt service to any customers. He said cold weather safety tips can be found on the PSO website here with energy savings tips here.