Thousands spend Saturday without power after storm

WASHINGTON — A weekend ice storm knocked out power for thousands on Saturday with outages lasting longest in Washington County, according to Alliant Energy.

Melissa McCarville, a spokesperson for the power company, said statewide outages peaked at about 10,000 customers on Dec. 14. Almost half that number — 4,940 — saw the lights go out at some point in Washington County, peaking with 3,640 at a time, according to McCarville.

But many of Washington County’s outages lasted longer than others in the state. McCarville said about 950 remained down on Sunday morning.

“To expedite restoration efforts, we enlisted support from crews around the state, and they worked overnight to make sure that we could get the Washington County area restored as quickly and safely as possible,” McCarville said. “When we had our update at 7 a.m. the next morning, we found out that the vast majority of (customers) had been restored.”

Of those still powered down Sunday morning, McCarville said all had the lights back on by 5 p.m., with most coming online even earlier, close to 11:15 a.m. While a third-party report from outage tracker FindEnergy said four of the about 10,000 Alliant customers it tracked in Washington County were without power as of late Monday morning, it was not clear whether those reports were verified or related to the weekend storm.

As Southeast Iowa braces for the winter ahead, McCarville said Alliant remained ready for any other harsh weather coming Iowa’s way.

“We constantly have people that are available 24/7, certainly we watch the weather, we pay attention, we make sure crews are ready to go, equipment is functioning properly, and we have people who are ready to deploy when it’s safe to do so,” she said. “That’s a constant for us.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com