Crews from Iowa are finding it’s a much bigger job than originally thought to restore power to areas of South Dakota hit by Monday’s winter storm. Dennis Corcoran of the Iowa Association of Electric Cooperatives says as crews arrived on-site they got a clearer picture of just how many power poles were snapped off by the ice storm.
He says they have as many as eight-thousand poles down, where they had thought there were two-thousand down.
Corcoran says the large number of broken poles is also creating another problem. Corcoran says they had talked about raw materials and poles being in a good enough supply to do the job, but he says that might not be the case now. Corcoran says there are some 80 linemen from Iowa and 45 to 50 trucks working in South Dakota. Corcoran says the area got a fresh blanket of snow last night and the temperature is down around eight degrees — making for tough working conditions.
Corcoran says crews report some 87-hundred miles of electric line are down — or enough to stretch from New York City to San Diego and back two times.