Northeast Oklahoma Electric Finishing Power Outage Repairs

Some of the last customers without power will soon have electricity, two and a half weeks after an ice storm crippled Oklahoma. <br/><br/>News on 6 reporter Emory Bryan says crews are now working to restore

Tuesday, January 30th 2007, 10:01 am

By: News On 6

Some of the last customers without power will soon have electricity, two and a half weeks after an ice storm crippled Oklahoma.

News on 6 reporter Emory Bryan says crews are now working to restore power near Twin Oaks.

"All the big lines are done, it's just individual taps now," said one worker.

A crew from Arkansas came in to help with repairs, and they've been working 16 days straight.

â€œThere's no end to this one, it keeps going and going, the amount of material that was torn up was pretty bad,â€ REC Line Worker Glen Wreyford said.

On Tuesday crews repaired a transmission line that serves more than two dozen homes. The utility says it took so long because in some places they had to use bulldozers to rebuild access roads that had been overgrown with trees.

Further up the line, Charles Dunham just had his power restored after two weeks without.

"We just been running the fireplace and we take shifts on it to keep warm, so that's how we keep warm and everything," the Twin Oaks resident said.

The damage to the lines extended to individual homes, where poles that held meters snapped too, and is just now being replaced. Hundreds of poles snapped just around Twin Oaks, pulling the lines down in rough terrain.

The power will be back soon, and repair crews will also be back soon.

â€œWe'll get their lights on and it will take a lot of coming back and redoing it to make it permanent,â€ said Wreyford.

Northeast Oklahoma Electric hopes to restore power from the Twin Oaks area up to Bull Hollow by Tuesday night. They believe that is the last line serving more than one home that needed repair.