UPDATE: MidAmerican Energy calls in more crews to restore power to QC residents

UPDATE: 9 p.m. Wednesday: At the peak of the storm Wednesday morning, about 26,000 customers experienced outages – primarily in eastern Iowa and the Quad Cities.

As of 9 p.m., fewer than 1,700 MidAmerican Energy customers remained without power, an update says. Line and tree crews from across Iowa traveled to assist with restoration efforts. Crew remain on track to restore most customers by midnight, with the remaining outages restored by noon Thursday.

Crews will work through the night. Areas with significant tree damage, broken poles or extensive line repairs will take longer to restore. Customers in the hardest-hit locations may experience longer outages while crews safely complete repairs and replace damaged equipment. Estimated restoration times may be updated as crews complete damage assessments and restoration work progresses.

• Iowa City: Currently 208 customers remain without service. Crews remain on track to restore all remaining Iowa City customers by midnight.
• Quad Cities, Iowa: Currently, 561 customers remain without service. Crews remain on track to restore most remaining customers by midnight and all customers by noon Thursday.
• Quad Cities, Illinois: Currently 1,118 customers remain without service. Crews remain on track to restore most remaining customers by midnight and all customers by noon Thursday.

As crews continue to restore customers, you can see current outage and restoration information here.

EARLIER UPDATE: 3 p.m. Wednesday: MidAmerican Energy has called in additional line and tree crews from areas including Waterloo, Des Moines and Sioux City to assist with storm restoration work in the Quad Cities area, according to the update from MidAmerican.

With the additional resources dispatched and around-the-clock staffing, crews will work throughout the night to repair damage and restore service to all remaining customers.

• Iowa City: As of 3 p.m., 306 customers remained without power. Crews expect to restore two incidents affecting a total of 180 customers by 6:00 p.m. and remain on track to have all remaining customers restored by midnight.

• Quad Cities, Iowa: As of 3 p.m., 2,782 customers remained out. Crews remain on track to restore most remaining by midnight, and all by noon on Thursday.

• Quad Cities, Illinois: As of 3 p.m., 2,869 customers remained out. Crews remain on track to restore most remaining customers by midnight, and all by noon on Thursday.

EARLIER: Severe weather in the Quad Cities this week has left thousands of residents and businesses without power.

Utility crews began work this morning to clear debris, repair lines and restore service. Geoff Greenwood, media relations manager for MidAmerican Energy, spoke with Our Quad Cities News via Zoom to share how the company prepared for the severe weather and how restoration is progressing. Click here for the latest on restoration.

“We had seen the projections for some severe weather moving into the Quad Cities, and it sure happened,” he said.

“It really appeared that this storm developed and expanded greatly and intensified as it moved through the Quad Cities area. What we saw were very high wind gusts and, of course, some lightning as well. It did some damage throughout the Quad Cities area, we saw a lot of trees down. Our crews are experiencing lots of tree debris, trees on lines, lines that are broken and down, lines that are broken that also took down power poles with them. So that is the typical type of severe weather damage that we see during a summer storm. This was intense. The winds were very high, and it did a lot of damage.”

Greenwood said the company has been following this storm for quite a while and created an action plan for service restoration. “This is a storm pattern that we’ve been following for a few days and we monitor this each and every day. What we’re looking for are telltale signs that this might affect our system and we could see that this storm would likely do some damage. You just never know how much and of course, there are also situations where you know wasn’t predicted to be very strong, and it was, or it was predicted to be very strong and it wasn’t. In this case we had some crews on standby just in case, and that includes line crews and tree crews. Once the damage was clear, we had all hands on deck and still do in the Quad Cities area, but that’s when we start moving other assets into the Quad Cities from outside the area to help restore customers faster.”

“We have called in line and tree crews from outside of the Quad Cities and that includes like Waterloo, the Des Moines area, even as far away as Sioux City. The advantage of doing that is that our crews in the Quad Cities, they’re working longer than normal shifts. We’re in a storm mode right now, but at the end of their shift, we’ve got other fresh crews that have arrived that can start working when they are done for a few hours to take a rest. That enables us to work around the clock, 24 hours a day, and we are in a 24-hour a day mode right now until we restore each and every customer. So, through our crews that we have on the ground in the Quad Cities, as well as backup crews that we’ve called in, both tree crews and line crews from other areas as far away as Sioux City, that gives us 24-hour coverage and that enables us to restore customers faster.”

He said those crews have been working hard all day to get customers back online. “We have made a lot of progress. Just in the first few hours, we restored thousands. Even by early afternoon, about three quarters of the customers in Illinois had already been restored and more than half in Iowa. We make progress each and every hour. When we have a severe event like this, what we try to do is prioritize addressing those circuits that can restore the largest number of customers quickly. So we’ll look and see where we can reroute some circuits to get those customers on right away, even if the damage hasn’t been repaired. In other cases, we’ll do that work to get those customers on and then we’ll start working our way down the line.”

“But it does take time. What really takes a lot of time is when we have situations where an entire tree is down. It’s taken down a line. It’s broken power poles. It takes time to get that debris out of the way, which is the top priority. That’s what the tree crews start doing, so our line crews can then start to work safely to do their thing. Oftentimes, they’ll have to remove all of that debris that’s been strewn across the road or across the sidewalk or a property and then start to repair it, get new equipment, get it hooked up and ready to go. If we’re talking about a broken pole, that can take several hours. We have to remove the pole, put in a new one and then attach the new equipment before we can get customers back on again.”

Greenwood has advice for people to follow after any kind of storm. “Any time that there’s a severe thunderstorm, there may be lines down. We are seeing lines down in the Quad Cities area. I can’t stress enough how important it is to treat that line as if it’s energized, even if you don’t think it is, even if you think, maybe it’s just a cable line or a phone line or a fiber optic line. Treat it as an energized power line. It may be touching an energized power line somewhere else on that circuit and that’ll do just as much damage as if it were a live power line. So, treat a downed power line as energized. Don’t get near it. Call it in. We will address it as quickly as we can. That’s a priority.”

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