(Estherville)—Crews continue the painstaking process of restoring power to areas hard hit by Wednesday’s ice storm. Aaron Ruschy, Superintendent of Field Operations for Iowa Lakes Electric Cooperative tells KUOO news they’re facing even more issues now as the temperature edges above freezing…(click here for comment.) “We’ve seen the ice start to drop now that the temperature warmed up so we’ve taken precautions by de-energizing a couple of substations, actually one complete substation in the northwest corner of Dickinson county and also one of our subs on the west side of Milford which feeds out toward Osceola county. We dumped a couple of those feeders. Reason being is as ice starts to fall off, as the temperature warms, the lines sag, get wrapped up and want to burn each other down, so we can mitigate a lot of work and damage by taking these outages now and alleviate a lot of headache later on or extended outages.”
Ruschy estimates that about 350 customers of ILEC were without power as of about 11:30 this (Thurs.) morning.
Ruschy says northwestern Dickinson county appears to be the area hardest hit…(click here for comment.) “In Dickinson county we’ve got about 20 broken poles. We’ve got probably about three quarter of those replaced and the wire back up. Osceola county we had a couple where we dipped a few lines, we have a few poles that were broken, replacing those and a few spans of wire also. We’ve brought crews in from our southern service territory, I’ve got crews in here from Storm Lake and Cherokee, also Emmetsburg, and pulled Estherville crews over in to help, and also Spencer. We’re all up in that northwest corner of Dickinson county trying to get this thing taken care of.”
Ruschy says the weight of the ice was more than the poles and lines in that area could stand…(click here for comment.) “As far as ice, we had up to pop can size ice on our conductor and last night about 1:30 it started tearing poles down so that is where we got most of it. Otherwise the rest of our system as you go south and east is clear with maybe just a little film on it.”
Ruschy requests everyone keep an eye out for any downed lines, as he says there’s a very real possibility of that happening with ice starting to fall off. He says you should stay well away from any downed lines and report them by contacting your provider.
Alliant Energy also reported scattered outages in its local service territory this (Thurs.) morning, including one affecting Orleans.
