VIGO COUNTY, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — ‘Do you have power?’ It seems like a silly question, but it’s one that you’ll hear often as you make your way throughout Vigo County.
I was expecting it to be on this morning actually, Terre Haute resident, Xzavier Sandifer said. “It (Duke’s website) said July 2 at midnight, so I thought it was going to be back on this morning.”
400 linemen. 120 tree trimmers. 100 logistic workers. That’s the crew that Duke Energy assessors determined was necessary to restore power in Vigo County after seeing first-hand the severity of Thursday’s storm. With those numbers, you might be wondering how several residents are still without power.
Duke Energy President, Stan Pinegar, said “the reason that this area is taking longer, is because the damage is more extensive.”
Harley McCorkle, Vice President of Customer Delivery at Duke Energy said, “we had more spans of wire down doing this outage than we haven’t had in years. Normally you’d see in an outage 30-40 spans of wire down. We had hundreds of spans of wire down across this whole county.”
What was so different about this storm to cause such an extensive power outage?
“The severity of the wind. At 85-95 miles an hour wind,” Pinegar said.
According to WTWO’s chief meteorologist, Jesse Walker, those winds are known as derecho.
“The force of those winds really were the difference and the widespread nature of this,” Pinegar said. “You know, we dealt with tornadoes in late March in our service territory, but you know, with a tornado it’s a very narrow, the damage is devastating but it’s a very narrow path. Here we had widespread damage, really throughout our service territory.”
Walker told viewers, in a Facebook Live post, that derecho winds aren’t super common in our area. Derecho winds are said to be a widespread-long-lived windstorm. Also referred to as ‘straight line winds.’ To be considered derecho, winds must reach above 58 MPH and last for at least 240 miles, both of which Walker said happened Thursday.
“Here in the Terre Haute, we probably have over 30 some circuits,” McCorkle said. “During this outage, we actually had about 29 circuit level outages at this time.”
As Crews made progress restoring power, more storms rolled through the Wabash Valley.
“Thursday was the big one, right,” Pinegar said. “And then Friday night and Saturday night we had storms that did create a number of other outages, that we had to encounter and take into account. So, it’s one of these deals where we make progress and because of these latter storms we’ve had additional outages that we’ve addressed as well.”
Duke Energy said several thousand people connect through each circuit. Some residents worry that the wait, may be due to a lack of supplies, However, Duke says that’s not the case.
“From the standpoint of restoration, after you have that plan, you’re going to have to attack the circuits and the equipment that bring the most people back, early. And then from there as you move yourself, further and further into the system, it becomes, you’re getting a dozen on or maybe they’re one offs, so it takes times, obviously to get to those where you’re going fewer and fewer customers, but they’re also hugely important to us,” Pinegar said.
As of 5:00 PM Monday, statewide, Rick Burger with Duke Energy, said they have replaced 110 miles of line and 160 poles. He went on to say that they are making good progress in the hardest hit areas of Terre Haute, Clinton, Greencastle and Brazil. With nearly 1,200-line workers with boots on the ground 12,000 Terre Haute Residents are still without power, 1,000 Clinton residents and 1,000 residents in Greencastle and Brazil combined.
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