Winter ice storms leave thousands without power

Clark Electric Cooperative had a busy week last week with numerous outages being reported during the December 1416 storms.

Clark Electric CEO Tim Stewart said outages occurred throughout the company’s six-county service area with Clark and Taylor County being the most heavily hit.

The first major outage was reported on Dec. 14 at 3:35 a.m. with most everyone gaining power back on Dec. 16 by 6 p.m.

Stewart said over 6,500 members of the co-op were affected at some point during the storms with approximately 2,500 members without power at one time.

In total, three substations lost transmission service for approximately one hour with one occurring on the 14th and two on the 15th. The outage on the 15th affected approximately 2,000 people. Most outages ranged anywhere from one hour to a maximum of 38 hours for some individual outages with some repeat outages occurring over the weekend.

Stewart thanked the members for their patience and the employees of the co-op for their performance during the storms.

“We would like to thank our members for being extremely patient during this severe storm and resulting power outages. Crews performed exceptionally during extreme conditions to get everyone back on safely and as quickly as possible,” Stewart said.