Jul. 16--With Claremore residents coming through the summer's first round of triple-digit temperatures, City leaders say demands for water and electricity -- both of which are in peak demand during the hottest months -- have fared well.

"Despite the extreme temperatures, we've had a relatively good summer, as far as the city's water supply goes," said Claremore Deputy Manager Matt Mueller. "These past two weeks of excessive heat, our (average) water production has been about five million gallons a day, about 1.2 million gallons above average, but consistent with daily water production compared to the previous three summers."

In 2006, Claremore Water Plant peaked at 5.5 million gallons of water produced per day, Mueller said, with a peak of five million gallons a day in 2007 and 4.4 million gallons in 2008

"Generally, peak (water) usage occurs in late July or August, but with the excessive heat we've seen in recent weeks, water demand has increased earlier than usual," he said.

City of Claremore Utilities Director Tim Miller said the city's first major testing to its electric systems proved equally as without problem.

"Thus far, we've really had no major problems keeping up with the increased demand for power from Claremore Electric customers," Miller said. "June saw Claremore Electric customers using between 34 or 35 million kilowatt hours, compared to, say, February, when the demand for the month was only 19 million kw hours."

The major of summertime power outages, Miller said, come from either overheated transformers or underground faults, both of which are cause by excessive, prolonged heat.

"Overheated transformers happen when the high ambient temperatures deteriorate the varnish on the coils inside the transformers," he said. "When that happens, the coil varnish breaks down and causes them to fault and burn out.

"Underground faults occur when -- because of excessive heat and/or lack of rain -- the ground dries and stretches the power lines, causing damage to the insulation around the lines and line breakage."

Although Miller said the City of Claremore has already had instances of minor power outages, such is common during weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees.

"Right now, the city's electric department is undergoing some major upgrades to its substations which should help prevent some power outages, or certainly increase the response time to get power restored in the event of an outage," he said. "For example, some of our substations are still using old Oil Circuit Reclosers (OCR) which largely stopped being used by electric companies some 20 years ago.