EDGEWOOD, Ky. — Many Kentuckians were without power Thursday during what continues to be a hot and stormy summer after severe storms again swept through parts of the state.
What You Need To Know
- The summer of heat and storms continues for many in Northern Kentucky
- Duke Energy customers lost power this week after storms on Wednesday
- Getting power restored has required 16-hour shifts from line workers during the extreme heat, including overnight hours
The 24 hours following the latest round of storms were not fun for Jimmy Green, who lives in Edgewood and lost power around 5:00 p.m. Wednesday.
“The tree came down, stressed the power lines, and then that caused the power pole to split, which pulled the service line on the house,” Green said, pointing to the mess of limbs and power lines created in his front yard.
It hasn’t been all that fun either for Duke Energy line crews, who’ve had to respond to many situations like these in just the past few weeks alone.
“And when we have those kinds of outages, it’s not going to be a quick fix. It’s not as simple as just sending crews out,” said Duke Energy spokesperson Sally Thelen. “Last night, about 7’o’clock, we were around 21,600 out. We were able to get those down to about 1,000 early this morning.”
Thelen was referring to all the company’s Ohio and Kentucky coverage area, but in Kentucky alone, there were 6,000 to 8,000 outages, she said.
That was down to 63 when she spoke to Spectrum News 1 Thursday morning. Those included the outages caused by the pole that went down near Green’s house on Dudley Road.
“Yeah, they’ve stayed on top of it. I mean, they were here. They worked through the night,” Green said. “They’re trying to get service to the people that can get service back, and I just got to call for reconnection once I get all my stuff established.”
These outages come off the heels of the outages caused by the previous week’s storms.
“That was the largest storm that we have worked, with 230,000 outages, ultimately that we ended up restoring during that storm in about three and a half days. That was a storm we hadn’t seen for about 10 years,” Thelen said.
Getting power restored has required 16-hour shifts from line workers during the extreme heat, including overnight hours.
While Thelen said Duke Energy doesn’t have a shortage of workers, she said the company is in a transitional period in which a lot of the veteran line workers have recently retired, requiring the company to ask a lot of its newer, younger crews.
It has also required Duke to ask its customers for patience.
“We appreciate their patience, and we know that it’s challenging for them to be without, and certainly when you have hot spells like we’ve been encountering here in the last week or so,” Thelen said. “Sometimes we’re not the most popular when we’re in neighborhoods doing that kind of work, but it’s storms like this week and last week’s that really make it critical.”
