Cambridge, Nebraska--Mother nature dealt the area an unexpected early Christmas present last week with the ice storm that rolled in on Wednesday, December 20th. Even though the trees were beautiful, the ice did a lot of damage, not only to the trees, but to the electrical lines. Twin Valleys Public Power District, like other power districts in the area experienced a large number of outages that took until Christmas Eve to get repairs made so everyone could have power.
At this point in time it is difficult to say how many Twin Valleys Public Power District customers were affected by the storm, but it was a significant number. Extra crews were brought in to help with the repair. One crew came from Hi-Line Power Company in Holyoke, Colorado; one crew from Norris Public Power District in Beatrice; and 2 crews from South Central Public Power District in Nelson, Nebraska. Combine this with the linemen from Twin Valleys Public Power District and there were 22 men working on the outages. There were also 9 people working in the office to answer the phones and keep track of where the outages were at.
The crews worked 13-14 hour days in an effort to get all of Twin Valleys Public Power District customers that were without power back on. The fact that this is the time of year with the least amount of daylight slowed the efforts of the crews. It is very difficult for them to see what the problems are in the dark.
Twin Valleys Public Power District is sorry that any of their customers had to be without power during this ice storm. Everyone’s patience was appreciated; the crews were working as fast as they could to restore power. With over 2,000 miles of energized distribution lines, in all or part of six counties, it takes awhile to get to all the outages.
The crews of Twin Valleys Public Power District will be working for several days repairing damage that was done, but didn’t need fixed to get the power back on.
