It’s been a full week of ice and snow off and on for many communities across Kentucky. Progress is being made in hard-hit eastern Kentucky. A variety of challenges accompany work to restore electricity. “It’s two steps forward, one step back,” said Kentucky Electric Cooperatives’ Joe Arnold.
He said sometimes it’s additional accumulation that causes more outages, and sometimes it’s by design. “As you attack certain outages, sometimes you actually need to turn off some power in some areas to safely be able to take care of some smaller areas within the outage,” noted Arnold.
At it’s peak, some 100,000 co-op customers were without power. Arnold said at midday Thursday, it was hovering around 40,000. In addition to about 400 contractors, cooperative repair crews are receiving help from states like Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama.
“There are nearly 800 additional personnel working right now in eastern and southeastern Kentucky on the storm restoration in addition to the crews and the co-op employees that are typically working there,” explained Arnold.
Arnold added he’s cautiously optimistic the last co-op members can see electricity restored in the coming week.
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