Power Outage Numbers Drop

The number of people without power across northeastern Oklahoma continues to drop Monday morning. PSO estimates fewer than 29,000 people are in the dark in the Tulsa metro area. Specifically, some of the worst hit areas are midtown Tulsa and Brookside. According to PSO, most of those areas will not have power restored until late Monday. The company hopes to have at least 95 % of its customers back on line by Monday night. OG&E reports a little more than 6,000 people in the dark in northeastern Oklahoma. Over half of those customers are in the Sapulpa area.

Turning to the rural electric cooperatives in northeastern Oklahoma, there are less than 500 Indian Electric customers without service and 1,200 customers of Northeastern Oklahoma Electric customers without power. Verdigris Valley Electric has about 3,700 customers in the dark.

Officials say the Verdigris Valley outages are mostly blamed on extensive damage to GRDA transmissions lines. Power crews have to repair the transmission lines before they can work on restoring power to customers.

GRDA has issued a release on that work.

"Grand River Dam Authority line crews, as well as other line crews, have been working around the clock to repair damage to a high-voltage transmission line which runs from Collinsville to Prue. That line received heavy damage during last week's ice storm resulting in 50 structures falling under the weight of the ice. Improving weather conditions continue to aid the linemen in the restoration effort that has been underway for a week, though they are still dealing with very heavy mud and rough terrain (in some cases, bulldozers are used to pull bucket trucks into place through the mud).

As of Monday morning, GRDA was planning to attempt to energize a portion of the line from near Skiatook to Green today. Also, if work continues to progress as it has over the weekend, all structures on the portion of the line between Green and Prue should be in place by day's end. By the end of the week, after the wires are in place and connections are made, that portion of line should be energized. A target date to have that portion of the feeder energized would be sometime within six days.

GRDA received damage to other portions of its transmission system during the ice storm but this line received the most damage."