Sunday winds knocked out power across Southeast Missouri, Southern Illinois

People who had kept their power through the entire ice storm last week found themselves in the dark Sunday.

Strong winds that came through the area -- peaking at nearly 50 mph -- blew hanging tree limbs onto wires and caused more outages over the weekend. Sunday afternoon, Ameren reported 684 customers without power in the 63701 ZIP code and another 22 out in 63703.

Power was restored to most of those customers by early Sunday night.

Only four customers in Jackson lost power because of the winds Sunday, according to Don Schuette, director of electric utilities for the city of Jackson.

"And we had them back on in about 15 minutes," Schuette said Sunday night. "We currently have zero customers out of power that we know of."

Several Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois counties were under wind advisories through the afternoon. The area experienced wind gusts exceeding 40 mph and more than 55 mph on hilltops and other elevated areas.

"It has definitely slowed us down," said Reuben Jeane, General manager of SEMO Electric Corp.

A news release from the company, which supplies power to customers from New Madrid, Mo., north to Perryville, Mo., said that as of Saturday morning "only 175 [customers] were still without power."

Jeane said Sunday that the wind had knocked out power to almost 200 additional people and that the strong gusts were "finishing up" the damage the ice storm had started.

He said most of the problems happened in the Bloomfield, Mo., area northeast to Scott City. Crews also had to shut some lines down momentarily in order to take up slack on the lines so they would stop swinging into each other in the wind, Jeane said. The lines bumping together can trip the breaker and cause an outage. Those outages only lasted about 15 minutes each, he said, and were for safety reasons.

"With winds like this, we can't work it with it energized," Jeane said.

By Sunday night power had been restored to all but a few customers, said Glen Cantrell, communications manager for SEMO electric.

"Even with the high winds they had a really great day today, restoring power," Cantrell said.

The Southern Illinois hills proved detrimental during the swift winds. The Southern Illinois Electric Cooperative reported about 1,100 members were out of power Sunday morning because of the rain and wind overnight.

Crews were working to again restore power to Johnson, Alexander, Massac, Union, Pulaski and Pope counties.

"We have about 800 still without power," said Jerri Schaefer, Southern Illinois Electric Cooperative staff assistant. "We're hoping that number drops more by midnight."

Robin Smith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky., said the wind will still be fairly strong in the next few days, but will stay at gusts around 20 to 25 mph.

charris@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 246