LITTLE ROCK — Progress continued Sunday in restoring power to Arkansans who were left in the dark following the snowstorm that struck the state Christmas Day.
Five days after an estimated 265,000 Arkansas utility customers were left without power, that total dropped to fewer than 21,000, according to state utility officials.
Entergy Arkansas, the state’s largest electricity provider at 700,000 customers in 63 counties, still had 19,554 customers without power early Sunday night.
That total had peaked Wednesday at 191,000 after a perilous combination of freezing rain, snow, strong gusts of wind that crippled utility lines and clogged state roadways.
Entergy spokesman Julie Munsell said Little Rock remained the biggest challenge to the more than 5,000 utility employees working to restore power. As of 5 p.m., Pulaski County accounted for 15,154 of the remaining power failures.
In Hot Spring County, 1,111 Entergy customers still faced power failures early Sunday night and 1,588 customers in Saline County were also without power.
The Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas saw 70,000 customers lose power on Wednesday, with 30,000 of those power failures in the Little Rock area.
By Sunday night, power was back for all co-op customers except for the 755 customers in the First Electric Coop, according to the organization’s spokesman Rob Roedel, who expected the 651 power failures in Saline County and others in Grant and Pulaski County would be fixed by the end of the night.
Officials from the North Little Rock Electric Department Services, which lost power for nearly 1,800 of its customers last Wednesday, said their teams achieved “100 percent restoration” of power services by early Sunday night.
The Southwestern Electric Cooperative, which lost power for 1,500 customers Wednesday, had no power failures on Sunday.
Munsell said Entergy’s 640 employees, as well as the roughly 4,700 restoration workers that came from 15 states, continued to work in 16-hour shifts in an effort to clear trees and restore lines.
The cost of bringing in those out-of-state workers, as well as their food and lodging, falls on Entergy, according to Munsell, who said it’s too early to tell how much this restoration effort will cost the utility.
“[The number of out-of state utility workers] reflects the magnitude of the event,” Munsell said. “In 2000, there were 7,000 people here for back-to-back ice storms ... it’s most indicative not of the internal resources available but of the scope of the event.”
Early on, the utility focused on its 11 transmission lines, which provided energy to area hubs that fed to residential and commercial customers.
But starting on Saturday and continuing Sunday, crews focused on repairing “downstream” lines at homes and businesses, Munsell said.
In Benton, the Broadus family, including their four-day old daughter, London, had their power back after losing it late Tuesday night.
Katie Broadus, 30, went into labor several hours after the power went out, and although she only lived a few miles from a nearby hospital, Broadus said ambulances took several hours to reach her home in time due to the slick roads and downed trees.
By the time they got there, London had been born for 30 minutes following a delivery on the family’s living room couch aided by flashlights, lanterns, boiled water, and a pair of neighbors, one of whom had some experience birthing cows.
“I was lucky. She didn’t have a cord on her neck, it went as smoothly as it could,” Broadus said. “We did what we had to. It was like back in the pioneer days.”
Munsell said citizens who spot utility vehicles idling in a parking lot or on the side of the road shouldn’t take it that crews aren’t working to fix the problem but that sometimes certain property isn’t immediately needed.
“Any visual showing that progress isn’t being made adds to frustration, but that’s only a small snapshot of everything and there are a lot of moving parts to this [restoration effort],” Munsell said. “They’re working 16 hours on then eight hours of rest and then they repeat the process. “They come in at 6 a.m., eat breakfast, then they hit the door. It’s a fluid process.”
Munsell said the extra utility crews will stay in Arkansas until Entergy officials are sure they are in a position to work well without them.
With a wet front coming in over the next few days that could bring a “wintry mix,” Munsell didn’t offer a timeline for total restoration or when the contractors would be sent back out of state.
Meteorologist Emilie Nipper with the National Weather Service said that with precipitation moving across the state in the next few days, they only saw the potential for freezing rain in the northern ends of the state, far from where the bulk of the restoration efforts are ongoing.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/31/2012