The winds died down today allowing our crews to assess damage from the storm yesterday. Right now, we know that 100+ poles are broken, and power lines are down across our 8-county service area from Scott Park to Alexander. This number could climb as crews continue assessing the damage.

At this time, we can confirm that power outages affected over 1,200 meters and spanned across almost all of Lane-Scott’s service territory. We have requested mutual aid assistance from neighboring cooperatives and are expecting help soon to repair what’s been broken. We also have contractor IES Commercial, Inc. from Holdrege, NE in our territory helping assist. This storm affected almost all of western and central Kansas, so everyone is in a similar situation.

When an outage occurs, power is first restored to substations and major lines and to critical infrastructure.  Yesterday we were able to back-feed electricity to areas to by-pass downed lines to get power to some people. These are temporary fixes and full voltage may not be getting to meters. You may experience partial electricity due to this.

Our biggest concern right now is logistics. As is the situation across all industries for the past year, electric utilities have been faced with global supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lane-Scott Electric, like many others, does not have extra supplies of poles or transformers. We are happy to say we are receiving loads of needed material from our suppliers and are scavenging from broken poles to use on what we’re putting back up. This also takes more time and resources.

We understand that it is very frustrating when a neighbor has lights, and you don’t. Often this may be because your home is on another circuit, or perhaps your meter has been damaged in a way that your neighbor’s meter is not damaged.

We ask for your continued patience as we do our best to respond to the effects of this storm. You can follow our Lane-Scott Outage Map on our website at: https://lanescott.ebill.coop/maps/OutageWebMap/