Seward County Independent

    The Dec. 29 ice storm that swept across central Nebraska leaving tens of thousands without power has many in Seward working with the recovery effort.
     Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) reported damage to 35 main transmission lines and 100 substations. It estimated that at least 20,000 homes and businesses lost power due to the storm.
     Hundreds of NPPD personnel and out-of-state contract workers scrambled to restore power and continue to work to bring power to as many as 10,000 customers, mostly in rural areas, still in the dark (as of Jan. 8).
     Seward County Public Power District (SCPPD) Manager Joel Navis said that two trucks and four employees of SCPPD have been working overtime assisting Cornhusker Public Power District (CPPD) in its repair effort near Albion since Jan. 2 as part of a mutual aid agreement.
     "They're working 14-hour days," Navis said.
     SCPPD Linemen Darrell Meese, Darryl Wattier, Todd Pfeil and Jeff Juranek made up the first crew. Paul Cowan, Tim Kraft and Jeff Bohning replaced Meese, Wattier and Pfeil, while Juranek stayed on to help.
     "The first day we got there it was so icy," Wattier said. "We had a farmer pull us out with a four-wheel-drive tractor because we were sliding around so bad."
     Trees continued to snap nearby from the ice as they worked.
     From ice to mud to loading poles in the dark (the linemen worked from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily), the crew struggled through many obstacles with nearly 50 other linemen from across the state, and even Iowa, to return power to CPPD customers.
     Despite their hard work, the fix is a temporary one. The foremost concern of the utilities is to restore power as quickly as possible.
     Many utility poles had broken off because of the weight of the ice. The crews dug new holes and reset what was left of the old pole. Many were not set up in a straight line, as icy, and later muddy, road conditions forced the linemen to drive along the crown of each road and set the poles at whatever point the truck would reach.
     Restoring power remains NPPD's first priority, NPPD Media Specialist Jeanne Schieffer said.
     Once power is restored, the focus will shift to stabilizing the utility system to handle this summer's electrical load, when irrigators and air conditioners come on-line.
     "In the bigger picture, the reconstruction effort may take through the bigger part of this year," Schieffer said, "and maybe into next year to get us back to the pre-storm picture."
     Crews near Albion have restored 15 of the 23 CPPD substations hit by the storm (as of Jan. 8) and SCPPD Operations Manager Daryl Hansen said that CPPD hoped to have all customers back on the grid by the Wednesday evening, Jan. 10.
     SCPPD linemen won't have much time to relax after finishing the job around Albion, as Hansen recently received a request for SCPPD linemen to join the 300-strong workforce in Dawson Public Power District (DPPD) near Lexington working to bring 1,900 customers back on line and repair 6,500 downed poles.
     "These guys are away from their families and it's a treacherous job when they're out there for one and two weeks at a time," Hansen said.
     The damage has kept Hughes Brothers, Inc., busy, as well.
     For the past week-and-a-half the company has supplied utility pole structures, hardware and cross arms for the massive repair effort underway in central Nebraska.
     "It's been a lot of overtime," Hughes Brothers President John Hughes said.
     And the overtime shows no sign of letting up soon. The company has shipped nine trucks of product and has standing orders for 25 more.
     "But that number will more than likely increase," Hughes said.
     Hughes expects to fill the remaining orders by the end of the month. With the amount of storm damage and difficult repair conditions, such a completion date will still keep the Hughes Brothers well ahead of the repair crews' needs.
     "The linemen out there are going to be working a lot harder than we are here," Hughes said. "They're the real heroes of it."
     Even as the NPPD hoped to restore power to affected areas by the week's end, bringing the utility infrastructure to its pre-storm levels may take more than a year.
     "The more we look at the footprint of this storm, the greater we understand the enormity of its devastation," NPPD President and CEO Ron Asche said in a Jan. 4 news release.
     The storm's economic devastation to Nebraska utilities may rival that of the March 1976 blizzard that paralyzed a 16-county region of southeast Nebraska.
     "Tens of millions of dollars is an early estimate of the damage NPPD and its customers have incurred," Asche said of the 2006 storm. "It could be a lot more."
     President Bush issued a major disaster declaration Jan. 7 for 57 counties in Nebraska, including Seward County, making Federal Emergency Management Agency funds available for cleanup and recovery efforts
     While the brunt of the storm missed Seward County, residents in the western part of the county lost power shortly before midnight Dec. 29.
     "We had what you call a floater," Navis said. "A wire came off an insulator on a sub-transmission line...it locked out a substation switch."
     The town of Utica and surrounding rural areas lost power from 11:30 p.m. Dec. 29 to 3 a.m. Dec. 30.
     "Aside from that we got along real well," Navis said. "We were very close to having problems but we caught a window where we were spared."