ST. LOUIS — Their trucks are loaded and their teams are ready, now crews at Ameren Missouri and Illinois are waiting to see what this storm does.
More than 100,000 customers were affected by power outages by the end of Friday night. Here’s what the outage statistics across all power companies looked like from PowerOutage.us, on our last check:
- St. Louis City: 5,122
- St. Louis County: 72,293
- Jefferson County: 26,783
- Franklin County: 14,467
- St. Charles County: 2,410
- Warren County: 493
- Washington County: 1,697
- St. Francois County: 1,805
- Ste. Genevieve County: 60
- Crawford County: 471
- Gasconade County: 658
- Phelps County: 4,530
- St. Clair County: 15,477
- Madison County: 4,530
- Monroe County: 8,664
- Randolph County: 2,365
- Clinton County: 3,033
“We’ve been monitoring the weather for the last several days,” Ameren Illinois’ Brian Bretsch tells 5 On Your Side, “making sure we have enough tree trimmers in place, making sure we have enough outside contractors to come in assist our boots on the ground.”
Ameren logistics employees have also called area hotels to confirm availability should crews need a place to stay. There’s been more preparation for tonight’s storm than most. “For this one, the high damaging winds are definitely a concern,” explains Ben Lynch with Ameren Missouri, “when we start to see 75 mile an hour or greater winds it can cause a lot of potential safety concerns for employees.”
With all crews on call, all weekend, it’s a matter of waiting. Bretsch says, “We’ve done everything we can up to this point to make the system more robust, but mother nature continues to come with more and more vengeance it seems like.”
There is a glimmer of optimism amongst Ameren crews, especially the tree trimmers. “If there is any sort of a silver lining and that would be a small silver lining is that there are no leaves on the trees and what that does is allow the wind to blow through the trees,” Bretsch tells 5 On Your Side.
