Storms leave thousands in the dark
Tue, 08/20/2024 - 2:10pm
admin
By:
Amanda Mendez, publisher
Powerful winds and lightning knocked out power to more than three thousand area residents last Thursday night and Friday morning. A release from Howell-Oregon Electric Cooperative confirms 1,500 of their members lost power. In the City of West Plains, “approximately 2,100 residences,” lost power said Public Relations Coordinator Cody Sanders. There were no reported outages in Willow Springs, said Utility Clerk John Martin.
By Friday afternoon, only about thirty of that number were without power - 22 HOEC customers and eight in West Plains.
“The storm brought lots of limbs and trees down causing many of the outages. Crews had to cut those off the lines and make repairs to wires before they could be energized. There was also localized flooding that caused issues. Patrick Bridge near Caulfield was underwater, as were many other low-water crossing, making traveling to the outage areas a challenge as well,” said HOEC’s release.
In the HOEC service area, there were seven broken poles. In West Plains, the city had to replace six poles.
“City of West Plains Street Department and Electric Department personnel worked throughout the night to restore power and remove storm debris,” Sanders said. “Our electric crews couldn't go up in the bucket trucks due to the lightning at certain points in the night. That delayed some of the restoration efforts.”
In a widespread outage like this, decisions about where power can be restored first is all in the design of the grid, said Myles Smith, HOEC Director of Member Services. Crews reenergize the biggest lines first before working to restore the feeder lines.
"Thank you to everyone for your patience during the outage," said HOEC Assistant General Manager Aaron Wheeler. "Line crews and additional personnel, inside and out, worked the outage, making sure members' outage reports were entered in the system and crews could locate the issues to make repairs. Two crews from Kiowa, our pole change contractor, also assisted with the outage restoration."