Just over 1,900 Three Rivers Electric Cooperative (TREC) members were without power from Sunday night into Monday morning due to the thunderstorms that struck the cooperative's service territory.
"While we knew that pop-up showers and some storms were forecast, we did not expect them to be as severe as they were," said TREC General Manager Tom Werdenhause. "We really appreciated the patience of our members as our employees worked through the night and into the morning answering calls, coordinating crews and restoring outages. We never like for our members to be without power, and we especially don't like them to be without power for very long. With Sunday night's storm, we had to deal with some lengthy outages."
According to information from TREC Operations Supervisor Roger Kloeppel, the first outage call came in at 5:24 p.m. in the Miller County area. The storm caused 46 separate outages. While the damage was widespread, it mostly affected the southern two-thirds of the cooperative's system which includes Osage, Maries, Gasconade, Miller and Franklin counties.
Of the 46 outages, Kloeppel said there were 35 line outages and 11 transformer outages.
"These outages affected 1,909 members for an average of 4.8 hours each," Kloeppel said. He also noted that there were members who were without power for less than four hours and some who experienced a much longer outage.
"The damages to our system were caused by wind blowing trees over onto power lines and lightning strikes causing the lines to burn down," Kloeppel added.
There were 599 co-op members who called in about the outage.
"It is important that our members call in to report an outage," Werdenhause said. "While we do have an email account and a Facebook account, we do not monitor those 24 hours a day and we want to make sure all outages are properly logged. Our members are encouraged to follow our progress on Facebook and through the outage viewer on our website at threeriverselectric.com."