Mother Nature Causes Outages

“Mother nature is at it again!” were the words of the Operations Manager at Wheat Belt PPD explaining the widespread outages throughout our service territory due to downed poles and lines.

Saturday’s storm damaged 47 poles from Redington to Lewellen, and Monday’s storm damaged an additional 46 poles from Sidney to north of Lisco. Both storms covered a significant area of our service territory, resulting in widespread outages.

Our on-call linemen were dispatched Friday night to repair outages in the Lewellen area. Several crews were called Saturday at 5 p.m, working through the night and additional linemen were dispatched at 6 a.m. on Sunday until power was restored to all residential services around 7 p.m.

Storms hit again on Monday night about 8:30 pm, six linemen worked through the night, the rest started about 5 a.m. Tuesday morning. Additionally, Wheat Belt extended a call to Panhandle Rural Electric Membership Association (PREMA), Alliance NE, to help repair and replace damaged line and infrastructure. Power was safely restored to all but three of our residential customers by 7 p.m.

Thank you to our crews for working long hours, and through the night, to ensure power restoration and to our customers for their patience. We appreciate all the kind words and understanding from our customers, we realize how frustrating and difficult it is to be without electricity. Thank you to the family that delivered supper to our linemen on Sunday evening and the employees’ family that delivered lunch on Sunday.