ILEC Official Reporting Significant Damage To Their Distribution System
ILEC Official Reporting Significant Damage To Their Distribution System
December 16, 2021Steve Schwaller
(Estherville)– A rural electric cooperative that serves a large part of northwest Iowa is reporting significant damage to its distribution system as the result of Wednesday’s severe storms and the ongoing damaging wind throughout the night. Rick Olesen, President and CEO of Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative, tells KUOO news the damage to their system is widespread…
“We saw a lot of debris from structures, trees, buildings, that became airborne and especially on our power suppliers transmission systems. It really wreaked havoc. And so we saw outages across our entire eight county system, with a lot of them concentrated in the Aurelia area down in Cherokee county, Graettinger, West Bend area, and then up to the northeast in northern Kossuth county. Just a tremendous amount of outages on the transmission system.”
Olesen says about 36 of ILEC’s member-owners remained without power as of mid-morning today (Thurs.)…
“Our hearts really go out to our member-owners who lost hog or cattle confinements, their homes, roofs, machine sheds. There’s a lot of damage out there and some of these sites where we’re trying to restore service now, meter pole and service facilities are heavily damaged, we’ll get those back on today, but they may not even be ready to receive service. And for some of those folks it’s going to be a little bit of a challenge here right before Christmas, unfortunately. They’re going to have a lot of work ahead of them and we’re here to support them.”
Olesen says crews worked throughout the night to restore power where they could…
I didn’t know if that was going to be possible with the high wind. Sometimes it’s very difficult to work with a basket up high in the air when you have 60 mph winds with even higher gusts, but our field staff did a tremendous job and responded. We staged everything out yesterday afternoon to prepare for this, and boy, as I say it definitely lived up to the predictions. We hope that going into the weekend we have everything, hazards mitigated, and the system in good, stable shape to get us through the weekend and the holiday season.”
Olesen encourages those without power who are using generators to make sure they are doing so safely. He says they need to make sure they have the proper wiring and switches so as not to back feed power lines, and to make sure generators are properly vented to avoid carbon monoxide buildup. Olsen says also reminds anyone who sees a downed power line to stay away from it and call their utility provider to get it taken care of.
