Tom Cain, El Dorado Springs Utility Director

“We really don’t know how many there were.”

“The ice pulled service lines pulled off of houses and also shorted out some main lines. A little bit of a mixture of everything. A couple of poles broken off.”

“We were called out about 9 o’clock Wednesday night.”

Q. When did you get everybody back on?

“I think Friday afternoon.”

Q. Did you have to put in a lot of overtime?

“Yes, we put in a lot of overtime Thursday night and Friday night and Saturday. They worked a while on Wednesday night, then got to go home and were called back out.”

Q. Was their more damage in any particular area of town?

“It was all over town. We had services down all over town.”

Q. And everybody is back up now?

“As far as we know, everybody is back up. And they are working on a pole today (Monday) a pole that we got broke off. Hopefully we’ll get back to normal in the next several weeks.”

Q. It’s a good thing you have had tree trimming programs in the past or it would have been worse.

“Yes, we try to keep up with it. I know we’ve got small crews but we try to keep up with it.”

Q. Sounds like you had a lot of fun.

“Them boys did good. They did a great job. They stuck with it until they were done. “

Q. How many do you have on your crew that does that?

“We just have four on the electric crew.”

He said they had four of the water crew that helped but didn’t handle the hot wires.

City Manager Bruce Rogers

Q. How many electric customers did you have off during the ice storm?

“We can’t just push a button an tell like Sac Osage can. I’d say we had about 50% of our customers off.”

Q. How many electric customers do you have?

“Just under 2,000 accounts so we had about 1,000 off.”

Q. And you had some broken poles?

“There was one at Park and Hayden.  We had it replaced with the help of a five-man crew that came from Independence. They are part of the Missouri Utility Alliance of which we are a member so it was a mutual aid request. The other pole they replaced was on West Marshall.”

“The crews worked about 24 hours straight.”