Ice, wind knock out power

Old Man Winter sank his claws into residents of Donley County and the Rolling Plains last week, resulting in school, college, and business closures and recurring power failures.

AEP-Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO) customers first started experiencing losses Thursday with peak outages numbering 1,480 in Clarendon and 345 in Hedley and more than 3,000 others in other communities.

SWEPCO’s spokesman Scott McCloud reported that the company sent additional personal from East Texas and Arkansas.

SWEPCO customers experienced a prolonged outage on Friday from 3:50 a.m. to late in the afternoon. More than 1,850 customers were affected locally, and the peak number of outages for SWEPCO’s service area was 5,139. The company services some 7,000 customers in the eastern Panhandle.

Tommy Hudson with SWEPCO in Wellington said the company’s main transmission line was down Friday and that servicemen were also dealing with the lines “galloping” – a phenomenon where the wind shapes ice on the lines into an airfoil and the line begins basically flying in the air and comes off the insulators.

Some SWEPCO customers were reportedly without power for prolonged periods. One residence hall at Clarendon College was without power for 47 hours.
Customers of Greenbelt Electric Cooperative also were hit by the storm with as many as 1,200 experiencing power losses.

“We lost about 100 poles and a lot of cross arms,” said Greenbelt Member Services Manager Randy White. “The lines were getting heavy with ice, slapping together, and getting twisted.”

White said Greenbelt still had lines with heavy ice on them at Jericho Tuesday morning.

“I saw one neutral that was sagging down to 15 feet off the ground,” he said. “For every half inch of ice on a span of line, it adds 500 pounds to the weight. Then the wind starts blowing, and you have problems. If you lose one pole, you’re liable to lose 15 in a row.”

Greenbelt brought contractors in from Borger Thursday ahead of the storm to help make repairs.

White said Greenbelt gets about half its power from AEP, so when that company’s transmission line went down, Greenbelt’s customers were in the dark, too.

“Then they also turned us off Saturday afternoon when their guys found a floater (a line that had come off an insulator),” White said. “They had to take us offline to repair that.”

Power was pretty well fully restored Tuesday, but more wet weather is expected over the next several days.
“Hopefully it will just be rain,” White said.