When Lori Larsen began at Oakdale Electric Cooperative (OEC) 29 years ago, she never thought she would have gained so much knowledge of the electric industry and worked in multiple different departments. Lori began as a customer service representative handling the front desk and then moved to collections. She later went into member services working with the load management program and assisted with mapping. Time in those departments didn’t last long as most of her career was spent behind the radio in the operations department.
Although the line crews are out restoring power in various weather
elements, there needs to be someone in the office tending to the various outage reporting, map updates, radio communications, and more to keep the work flowing in the field. That person needs to adapt and overcome challenges as they happen, especially when days don’t go as planned or weekend plans end up getting cancelled because of a storm. And that person also needs to keep a level head and not succumb to the stress of the job. The title is Operations Administrator and Lori Larsen handled the job and all its responsibilities, effortlessly.
As the 2000s marked a pivotal shift to the digital age, internal and external communications changed quickly. “Technology advanced so much and has allowed the office personnel to assist more with outage restoration,” Lori stated. Outages report automatically to the co-op verse waiting for a phone call. Metering technology has advanced to be able to turn members on or off remotely. No more having to read meters and enter readings into the computer.
In 2008, Lori conquered a large project consisting of converting paper maps to digital maps and continued to keep up with the ongoing updates to mapping. New technology like SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) has allowed office employees to assist crews remotely from the office. A project that Lori worked on implementing was operation analytics which reduces outage times by narrowing down where the outage fault occurred.
However, no amount of technology can prevent bad weather from destroying infrastructure. Lori won’t soon forget back in 2018 when major parts of OEC service area were flooded, causing poles and underground lines to wash out. The event was declared a major disaster, and the co-op was entitled to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) funds.
More recently, the June 2022 tornado that ripped through OEC territory at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday evening right at the end of the workday, left a distinct trail between Tomah and Oakdale. Lori remembered, “watching the outage map and seeing substation after substation go down, I just thought time to buckle up because I’m going to be here for a while!”
Crews were dispatched at 4:07 p.m. with a total of 72 outages that impacted 7,081 OEC members. Additional line crews were called in through the cooperative’s mutual aid program known as ROPE – Restoration of Power in an Emergency. After two days, crews replaced 29 poles, strung 13,200 feet of new wire, and fully restored power by 3:21 p.m. Lori and now retired Cheri Ness, spent countless hours assisting crews in the field from the office, during one of the most notable tornado disasters in OEC history.
Operations Director John Ollendick has worked closely with Lori for many years and stated that Lori is a key part of the success of the operations department on a day-to-day basis, as well as after hours and during major storm events. “You would think that she had been a line worker at one point with her knowledge of the field,” John divulged. It goes without saying that everyone is happy for her but as one of the linemen proclaimed, “Lori is the MVP of the line department, and she will be greatly missed.”
Given that Lori played a crucial role in the operations department, she was able to train in her successor. Brielyn Georgeson started at OEC in August 2025 as a member relations specialist/collections. When the operations administrator job was posted, Brielyn saw the opportunity to move up within the co-op. “I thought it was an area I could succeed and wanted to challenge myself to expand my knowledge of the electric industry,” Brielyn indicated.
Beginning December 29, 2025, Brielyn was side-by-side with Lori to take in a plethora of information. “Lori is great at explaining procedures and breaks things down in a way that a beginner can understand, which has helped me tremendously on absorbing all the duties involved in the position,” Brielyn mentioned. Fortunately, for the benefit of training purposes, Brielyn got her taste of multiple outages on a windy Friday in March that led to an early clock in and late clock out. “I’m truly grateful that Lori provided a perfect blueprint for me to accomplish this position, I just hope I’m half as successful as her.”
With four months to train in Brielyn, Lori concluded with, “I’m confident that Brielyn will be a tremendous asset to the operations department between her ability to learn quickly and retain information, I have no doubt that she will thrive as the operations administrator.”