Hawkeye REC Crews Making Repairs from Sunday’s Storm

Cresco, IA  (1:30 p.m. May 23, 2011)—  Hawkeye REC crews worked overnight to get power back to members who suffered outages form strong gusty winds and tornados during yesterday’s storm. Currently about 12 members continue to be without power. These locations suffered substantial storm damage and are requiring additional clean-up of debris or an electrician for secondary service work.

At its peak, the co-op had about 850 members without power. Two substations were out due to damage to Dairyland Power Cooperative’s transmission lines that feed power into the substations. Those were the Lime Springs and Saratoga substations.

Dairyland Power Cooperative had 30 transmission poles north of the Saratoga substation down and four transmission poles feeding the Lime Springs substation.

Power to the substations was restored at about 7 p.m. At that time HREC had about 150 members without power. Crews concentrated on power line problems in isolated areas of its service territory.   Power to most individuals was restored early this morning around 12:30 a.m. 

Hawkeye REC crews along with the assistance of our power line contractor, Highline Construction, will be working on clean-up repairs, putting the cooperative  electric distribution system back together which is  expected to take at least two weeks – pending that no additional storm damage occurs during this time.

“Safety is on ongoing practice of our cooperative and we urge our members to stay away from downed power lines and urge members and the public to take caution near downed power lines and broken poles,” says Hawkeye REC Operations Manager Mike Walton. “We have some line segments that have been temporarily repaired to get service restored to all our membership. We especially urge caution with large farm equipment working around these lines until final repairs are completed.”
 

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