Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) and hundreds of contractors and mutual aid crews worked diligently through the weekend to continue the restoration efforts. More than 1,000 resilient, highly trained field workers and mutual aid partners are still currently deployed throughout our service territory to address an extraordinary amount of damage that unfortunately affected OPPD’s rural customers the hardest, especially those in Saunders County, Dodge County and Washington County.
This event marks the fifth-largest outage in our history, measured by the number of customers who lost power. However, in terms of damage to OPPD infrastructure, it is by far the largest we have ever encountered. Huge sections of circuits and lines were ripped out by hurricane-force winds, necessitating a complete rebuild of those areas and the removal of trees, debris and broken equipment. When it’s all said and done, we anticipate that we will have replaced nearly 1,200 poles.
Bottom line: finishing this work will take time, but we will keep going until the job is done. With that being said, many of the most devasted areas of the district are in rural areas, calling for more complex, time-intensive fixes that require more machinery, equipment and resources.
“This is the worst storm I’ve ever seen as far as destruction,” said Steven Weaver, a working line crew leader from Bennington who has worked at OPPD for 25 years.
Weaver said the ice accumulated on power lines after the blizzard was thicker than any he’d ever seen before. Damage was particularly severe in the more exposed rural areas. “It’s not just bad in one location,” he said. “It’s complete devastation.”
As we move through the next few days, we will enter a phase where restoration work becomes more localized. Repairing specific areas will restore power to a smaller number of customers, which may make progress appear slower. However, we want to emphasize that our workers, contractors and mutual aid partners are working just as hard as ever to restore power to everyone.