Photo provided The area near the entrance to Donner Park in Columbus was blocked off Sunday due to a downed power line.
Some customers are still without power Monday after severe storms swept Bartholomew County beginning last week and continuing over the weekend.
By 10 a.m. Monday, 81 homes and businesses served by Duke Energy between Hope and Old St. Louis Crossing were still without power, according to the utility’s government and community relations manager Kylie Foster.
While Foster’s district serves southeast Indiana, damage was reported across 28 districts after the first storm ripped through the Indiana on Thursday, Foster said. Crews began to make repairs immediately, she said.
Crews found many broken poles, transformer fires, trees falling into power lines, and spans of wire down, Foster said.
By Friday afternoon, there were 2,243 Duke customers in Bartholomew County without electricity, with 70 separate outage events, Duke spokeswoman Lisa Brones Huber said.
At least two circuits in the Elizabethtown area were damaged, which resulted in a peak of just more than 11,160 outages Saturday in both Bartholomew and Brown counties, she said.
Foster said she had heard line workers employed in the Terre Haute area, as well as a few other Indiana locations, were sent to assist Bartholomew County Duke Energy employees in restoring power.
Damage in Indiana was so widespread that reinforcements had to be eventually called in from Ohio, Kentucky, the Carolinas and Florida, she said. In addition, about 500 independent contractors were also put to work, Foster said.
From Thursday afternoon through Sunday night, there were about 20,000 residents and businesses in Bartholomew County without power at one time or another, Foster said. But the utility was optimistic all electricity could be restored in the Columbus area no later than mid-afternoon Monday.
For Bartholomew County REMC, the first reports of power outages began coming at about 4 p.m. Thursday, according to Marty Lasure, vice president of communications and member services for the electrical cooperative.
Crews worked through Thursday night into Friday, restoring power to all but 10 customers. Lasure said. But that’s when the second round of storms arrived late Friday night and continued well into Saturday, she said.
By Saturday afternoon, 2,000 additional homes and businesses served by REMC were without electricity, Lasure said. That includes a number of homes and businesses that lost their power Thursday, had it restored on Friday, but lost it again on Saturday, she said.
“We worked all day Saturday until midnight, but the crews had to get some rest,” the utility spokeswoman said. “They got started again at 6 a.m. Sunday, but a third storm came in during the afternoon. That knocked out power to about 300 in German Township.”
But after REMC crews began repairs early Monday morning, all power to all customers were restored in a matter of hours, Lasure said.
