Hart EMC Brings in Extra Crews To Finish Power Line Work Today

It has been almost 48 hours since ice and freezing rain moved through our area and just over 1,000 Hart EMC customers were still without electricity Wednesday morning.

Hart EMC spokesman Keith Brown said over 5,500 customers had lost power initially.

Brown said Tuesday afternoon work to restore power to customers was hampered by a slow thaw Tuesday, which caused more trees to fall.

“With the amount of ice, some of the power lines we got back up fell down again and we had to go back out,” he said. It’s just  because of the amount of ice on the trees and power lines. It’s just not melting as fast as we hoped, but we’re working as quickly as we can.”

This morning Hart EMC is reporting about 1,900 customers still without electricity and another 580 new calls for repairs.  By late morning, that number had gone down to 1,042 outages and 476 members reporting new outages.

Brown said crews worked 30 hours straight Monday night through Tuesday night before taking a break, but he said they will be back on the job today.

“We have additional crews coming in today,” Brown said early Wednesday. “We’ve got our outages down to about 1,200. There are some today we expect to find that we didn’t know about. Our plan is to finish today.”

Brown said crews will be concentrating in Northern Franklin County in the Gumlog and Red Hill areas.

One concern however, is the next round of severe weather today.  No ice or snow in today’s forecast but Brown said the predicted strong winds could cause a problem.

“It’s always a concern when trees are obviously weakened from the ice,” he said. “We’re working with the right of way supervisor. He’s got additional resources that we need to have in case those trees fall that are in a weakened condition.  So we’re going to be ready if we do start having trouble, but we’re hoping that the ice took out what it was going to take out and the remaining will not fall due to the high winds.”