Power outages, toppled trees costly for cities, counties, homeowners and businesses
OKLAHOMA CITY – Electric service to more than 615,000 Oklahomans was interrupted by last week’s three-day wave of rain, sleet, snow, frigid wind and freezing rain. Public Service Co. of Oklahoma had more than 114,000 customer outages blamed on the ice storm, but had restored more than 106,000 of those by last Thursday night, the company reported on its website.
“Late Wednesday afternoon was when we reached our peak for outages,” said Stan Whiteford, PSO’s region communications manager. “We had a little more than 36,000 then, which was the most we had out at any one time.”
The utility company’s Chickasha service area – including Chickasha, Norge, Amber, Pocasset, Tuttle and Minco – was hit the hardest, he said.
Electric service in the Hobart area was expected to be restored by Friday afternoon, and in the Lawton and Tipton areas by Friday night. “A little over 4,000 customers in the Chickasha area,” as well as a few “exceptions who had extreme issues,” were still out of power Friday afternoon, Whiteford said. “We expect to have all customers in that area restored by 10 p.m. Saturday,” he said.
Public Service Co., based in Tulsa, supplies electricity to more than 550,000 customers in Oklahoma: in and around Tulsa and McAlester plus residences and businesses in more than three dozen southwestern Oklahoma cities and towns.
PSO’s service territory in southwest Oklahoma includes Altus, Apache, Arapaho, Blair, Burns Flat, Cache, Carnegie, Cement, Cyril, Davidson, Duke, Duncan, Elgin, Elmer, Fletcher, Fort Cobb, Gotebo, Gould, Grandfield, Granite, Hobart, Hollis, Humphreys, Lawton, Lone Wolf, Manitou, Martha, Mountain Park, Mountain View, Roosevelt, Rush Springs, Snyder, Sterling, Temple, Terral, Tipton and Waurika.
Public Service Co. had more than 1,000 individuals “in the field working storm recovery,” Whiteford said. That number included all PSO crews in western Oklahoma plus additional PSO employees from the eastern half of the state (including Tulsa); workers from PSO’s sister companies SWEPCO, AEP Ohio and Kentucky Power; plus outside contractors and tree crews.
“We called for additional resources even before the ice storm hit,” Whiteford said.
By the time the first wave of inclement weather arrived on October 26, “We already had outside resources on the ground,” he said. “By last Wednesday night we had all 1,000+ workers spread out across the impacted areas.”
“It probably will be several weeks before we have a good accounting for all of the costs associated with this ice storm,” Whiteford said.
‘LOTS’ OF TREE DAMAGE IN COMANCHE COUNTY
Elgin and elsewhere in Comanche County had “quite a bit” of tree damage from the ice storm, said Amy McGlone, Comanche County’s public information officer. In fact, Comanche County was one of the nearly four dozen counties in which Governor Stitt declared a winter weather disaster emergency.
The Comanche County Board of Commissioners approved a “Disaster Emergency Proclamation” on Monday which declared that the county is “a disaster area, entitled to aid, relief and assistance” from the State of Oklahoma and/or the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The county’s Emergency Management department estimates the volume of broken limbs and trees at 50,000 cubic yards, McGlone told the Ledger on Tuesday. The county intends to apply to FEMA for reimbursement of expenses incurred in the cleanup, she said; expenses approved by FEMA will be reimbursed at the rate of $20 per cubic yard, McGlone said.
Ice storms are nothing new in Oklahoma. However, this one was particularly destructive because it occurred at a time when most trees still had their leaves. Tree limbs broke under the weight of the ice coating the limbs and leaves, and in some instances brought down power lines and utility poles with them. A few trees collapsed onto houses and vehicles.
“It appears we had a fair amount of damage, which is why we are setting up a plan for branch and tree cleanup,” said Tiffany Martinez Vrska, community relations director for the City of Lawton.
Residents can dump trees and branches at the Lawton municipal landfill through November 7, at no charge, provided they bring a current ID and water bill in which the name or address match.
The city also is working to schedule a citywide tree cleanup, which is anticipated to begin late next week, Vrska said. Trees and branches will be collected curbside for residents and there also will be a centralized, designated drop-off site for this type of storm debris. Collection dates and the drop-off location are still being finalized, she said.
The City of Lawton’s “initial ballpark estimate” of anticipated storm debris cleanup costs is $400,000, Vrska said. Also, city crews applied approximately 40 tons of salt and sand on city streets during the ice storm, at an estimated cost of $10,000, she said.
MORE THAN A THIRD OF COTTON ELECTRIC CUSTOMERS LOSE POWER
The ice storm disrupted power to more than one-third of Cotton Electric Cooperative’s members, Marketing and Communication Director Karen Kaley said.
The first outage reports began shortly after midnight October 27, and approximately 13 hours later 8,694 Cotton Electric members were without electricity, she said.
Damage from the rare October ice storm – including approximately 50 utility poles that snapped – “was from ice-laden tree limbs falling into lines and limbs and lines bouncing up when the ice melted,” Kaley said.
Cotton Electric crews were joined by contractors “to keep restoration efforts going around-the-clock,” she said. The final known residential outage was restored in the early hours of October 30.
Cotton Electric provides power to nearly 22,000 meters in eight southern Oklahoma counties: Tillman, Comanche, Caddo, Cotton, Grady, Stephens, Jefferson and Carter.
POWER DISRUPTED TO ROOSEVELT WATER WELLS
“We have lots of tree damage,” Roosevelt Mayor Nolan McCall said Thursday.
In addition, “We lost power to our water wells” south of town “and our generator would not stay running; it kept giving us low oil pressure, which shut down the generator. We did get the generator in to a dealer in Cordell and they worked on it for us. I put the town on restricted water usage until I could get another generator down to the wells.”
Friday morning a generator rented from a dealer in Newcastle was “wired up, plugged in, and started running” at 10:37 a.m., McCall said.
While electricity to the town of Roosevelt is supplied by PSO, Southwest Rural Electric Association based in Tipton supplies the power that runs the pumps in Roosevelt’s water wells, McCall said.
SWRE serves 7,578 customers in Oklahoma and Texas. Friday afternoon 1,250 of those customers (16.5% of the total) were without electricity because of the ice storm. The co-op has customers in five Oklahoma counties (Greer, Comanche, Jackson, Kiowa and Tillman) and five in Texas counties (Wilbarger, Wichita, Archer, Foard and Hardeman).
At one house in Roosevelt a tree limb tore the electric meter base “completely off the house when it hit the electrical line,” McCall said last Thursday. “I don’t know of any other major damage. However, I have not seen what tree damage was done to our cemetery, which has a lot of evergreen trees; probably a lot of work to be done there.”
LARGE PARTS OF OKC METRO AREA LOSE POWER IN STORM
Sean Trauschke, OG&E’s president and chief executive officer, said the ice storm was “probably the most severe storm we’ve ever had on our system.”
The utility company had more than 500,000 outages in central and northwestern Oklahoma during the three-day ice storm. Most of those who lost power lived in the western half of the state, but a large part of Oklahoma City was affected, too.
OG&E serves approximately 858,000 customers in Oklahoma and western Arkansas, according to the company’s website.
The utility reported it fielded more than 3,600 workers to restore electric service. Company crews were joined by employees from public utilities in Texas and 17 other states.
As of Saturday, the company found 639 poles, 566 cross-arms, 91 transformers and 178 transmission structures that were damaged or destroyed.