Presque Isle-- Nine counties serviced by the Presque Isle Electric and Gas Co-op have widespread outages with 31,000 customers still waiting to get the lights and heat back on.
“The storm is essentially unprecedented, worse than a hurricane and something most people are saying they’ve never seen,” said Presque Isle Electric and Gas Co-op CEO Allan Berg.
It’s going to be a heavy lift to get all of the power restored to customers.
It could take more than a week in some areas.
“Prepare for long periods of outages, we are currently restoring power. The devastation is extreme, we ae clearing the many trees that are down, in the roads and on our lines,” said Berg. “They smashed our systems to the ground, and we are rebuilding them. It’s not just simply putting a line back up. We’re rebuilding many sections of our facilities; that’s a slow process.”
But what makes this storm so different?
“One, we do not experience a lot of ice storms in our area like maybe southern Michigan or central U.S. Number two, there was an abnormal amount of ice,” said Berg. “Three, a lot of ice events occur when it’s borderline freezing, but we went from borderline freezing to cold, so the ice is not leaving the system.”
To make matters worse, “trees have crashed for about a 3-day period and it just continues to rip our systems down,” said Berg.
Right now, there is a focus on community essentials.
“We do have some level of prioritization in a normal event. This was 100 percent catastrophic. By default, our substations are near more populated communities and villages,” said Berg. “Keep in mind, a lot of times it was hard to find fuel within a 30-to-45-minute drive. So, we are focusing on critical stores, food, gasoline and making sure there are shelters for warming available.”
The final message Berg wants to reiterate to customers is safety and preparation for the days ahead.
“We know it’s going to be longer than a week for some individuals, if there’s critical issues with heating, they do need to plan for a longer outage duration.” said Berg. “Do not count on the past because this is not something we can benchmark from past experiences.”