Utility Crews Struggling to Restore Power in Storm-Damaged Areas
By Dave Franzman, Reporter
Line workers repair power lines along 61st Street between Garrison and Vinton Tuesday, July 12, 2011. Straight line winds from an early morning storm on Monday knocked out power to several towns in Eastern Iowa. (Brian Ray/ SourceMedia Group News)
By
Aaron Hepker
Story Created:
Jul 12, 2011 at 6:13 PM CDT
Story Updated:
Jul 12, 2011 at 6:48 PM CDT
VINTON, Iowa — Hundreds of homes and businesses in Eastern Iowa remained without power on Tuesday as utility crews scrambled to repair the serious storm damage.
Transmission company crews compared the kind of damage they’re seeing to what they’d typically see after a serious ice storm — miles of lines on the ground and hundreds of utility poles snapped off. Of course, the weather is obviously different from if crews were trying to restore power in mid winter.
If you measure the size of the job by the number of poles to replace, then you can put Alliant Energy down for about 400 in that company’s statewide territority. Kent Sodawasser, senior manager for Alliant customer operations, said he would have much preferred a tornado instead of the straight line winds that ripped through parts of the state early Monday morning.
“During a, typical tornado, you’re looking at replacing maybe a dozen poles,” Sodawasser said. Because the straight line winds impacted a much larger area Sodawasser said “with this particular event it was like a roller going over the countryside.”
Since the damage to electrical systems crossed utility boundaries, the repair timetable was different in different locations. For instance, Alliant crews expected to wrap up Wednesday in the eastern region and perhaps Thursday in the central part of the state.
Vinton, though, operates a municipal utility and the home-by-home hookups will take much longer. One manager estimated that 60 to 70 percent of Vinton customers were still without power as of Tuesday afternoon. He expected the majority to have electricity within two or three days.
As a municipal utility, Vinton called in crews from other municipal utilities statewide to assist.
Some residents in Vinton may try to “tough it out” without power. But one resident, Whitney Glew, said a lot of people appeared to do what she did — find somewhere else with power to spend the night.
“Last night (Monday) I came back at about eight o’clock and nobody was around. It was dead everywhere,” Glew said.
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