SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Work to restore power continues three nights after a winter storm rolled through the Ozarks.
Thousands of homes in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas are still sitting in the dark on Friday.
“We’re standing at 4,100 that are out of power,” said CEO of North Arkansas Electric Cooperative Mel Coleman. “About 2,000 of those are in Baxter County. The rest are spread across Fulton, Sharp, Izard. At the height of this, we had about 28,000. We’re making headway.”
Coleman said linemen from multiple states are coming to assist with the efforts to get things fixed.
“This is the closest thing to the 2009 ice storm that we’ve seen since then,” said Coleman.
While he said his team is always prepared for outages to occur, this time around was unique given the amount of heavy, wet snow that fell.
“We just didn’t know that this was going to be a snow that was very similar to an ice storm,” said Coleman. “We saw lines that were literally sagging to the ground.“
Crews are working as fast as they can.
“We work them 16 hours a day,” said Coleman. “They rotate their shifts. They do have to have their rest.”
OzarksFirst asked how much longer people could be without power.
Coleman said it still could be a few days, potentially Sunday.