SPRINGFIELD, Mo. —City Utilities of Springfield (CU) crews are hard at work continuing to restore power after what CU is calling the largest power outage since the 2007 ice storm.
City Utilities says they declared this an emergency in order to receive mutual aid from other areas. CU sent out over 100 linemen earlier Wednesday morning, with a group of linemen working to fix around 11 power poles down in a row just North of Springfield.
CU estimated 26,500 without power around 6:00 a.m. Wednesday, but as of 11:00 a.m., that number is closer to 23,000 compared to the 50,000 without power at the outage’s peak. City Utilities public relations manager Joel Alexander says there are going to see a lot of changes in that number as the day goes on. While there is progress, CU says this is a prolonged outage.
“This is going to be a long-term event,” Alexander said. “We are really going to thank people for their patience on this because it is going to take patience is going to take nonstop work on our part to get this back.”…