Power knocked out by storm

About 5,400 Southeast Missouri residents went without electricity Sunday -- some for up to 13 hours -- after remnants of Hurricane Rita caused 70 separate outages in the area, according to AmerenUE spokesman Mike Cleary.

High winds knocked trees into lines in many of the incidents, he said.

Cleary said it started at about 8:45 a.m. in the Bootheel area before moving upward into Scott City and Cape Girardeau. The height of outages was about noon, he said. People were without electricity anywhere from a few minutes to 13 hours, he said.

He said that the fact there were so many incidents hindered getting the problem resolved.

"If it's just one problem that affects 5,400 customers, we could have gotten it fixed pretty fast," he said. "But with there being 70 outages throughout the area, it took us 13 hours."

Systemwide, Ameren had 22,000 customers without power in Missouri and Illinois, he said.