Farmers help line crewmen fight mud in Southeast Missouri

POPLAR BLUFF, Mo. -- Many farmers have used their four-wheel drive tractors to pull the electric cooperatives' bucket trucks through muddy Southeast Missouri fields following the ice storm Jan. 27.

Stanley Estes, general manager of Ozark Border Electric Cooperative in Poplar Bluff, said it took two tractors and a bulldozer to move one of his utility's truck through a field near Campbell on Thursday.

Despite the muddy fields, Ozark Border reduced its outages Friday to fewer than 600.

"We still have some outages in the Broseley and Qulin areas and south of Poplar Bluff, but most are in the Malden/Campbell area," Estes said.

SEMO Electric Cooperative in Sikeston, Mo., expects to have power restored to its 397 remaining members by Monday night.

Pemiscot-Dunklin Electric Cooperative at Hayti, Mo., has reduced its outages to 5,500 and expects to get more substations re-energized this weekend, according to Jim McCarty with the Missouri Association of Electric Cooperatives.

Crews working to restore power at Pemiscot-Dunklin Electric Cooperative have work completed around most of the cooperative's substations, manager Charles Crawford said.

"We are doing a lot of work in preparation to bringing them up when the substations are ready," Crawford said. "We have a lot of circuits already completed. We have the transformers hung and the services up."

He said he hopes to see power flowing to some of the substations Sunday as transmission crews complete work on the devastated high-voltage lines leading into the area.

Crawford said the storm that swept through the area Wednesday set the restoration effort back at least two days. The heavy rain, combined with strong winds, caused the newly reset poles to lean and in some cases fall. Crews packed gravel around the poles to help keep them upright.

"It's moving on," Crawford says of the restoration effort. "The water is down, but the mud is still a problem. It slows down getting the poles in the ground. But the people in here working, they are just busting to get it done. You stop and think, we are going to have this entire system that took 75 years to build rebuilt in three weeks. That's a pretty good record."