‘A long road’: Storm creates largest outage ever for Kansas City area Evergy company
Evergy customers suffering from electric outages after severe weather stormed through the Kansas City area were told to expect power restored by early next week at latest.
Chief Customer Officer Chuck Caisley said the restoration effort will continue throughout the weekend in a video posted over the utility company’s social media late Saturday morning.
“This is the largest storm we’ve had, the largest number of outages we’ve had since we became a company,” he said in front of an Evergy truck repairing power lines.
“It’s going to be a long road at this point.”
Evergy, the area’s largest provider, was dealing with outages across Kansas and Missouri on Friday evening and into Saturday afternoon. At the storm’s peak, about 186,000 customers were left without power. The five-year-old company has since worked to restore more than half of customer-reported outages, with the number of people affected falling from 100,000 Saturday morning to less than 65,000 as of the afternoon.
Most outages continued to impact Johnson County residents in Kansas and Jackson County residents in Missouri, according to data tracked by Evergy’s outage map.
About 27,000 people in Johnson County and 19,000 people in Jackson County remained without power Saturday afternoon, said the company’s website.
“This is a big restoration,” Caisley said.
He explained Friday’s storm traveled from Salina, Kansas, through the Kansas City metro and continued heading east, producing, at one point, between 80 and 100 mile per hour wind gusts.
No reports of tornadoes in rural areas have been confirmed, he said.
Hundreds of poles had fallen down and trees were left strewn across streets, he said, causing the outages. Many intersections were without working streetlights. Caisley urged drivers to treat any unlit cross street as a “four-way stop” out of caution.
About 240,000 customers were impacted in total, he said.
As of Saturday, 2,000 employees were working to restore power to customers and 1,000 more were expected to start working through the evening.
Restoring power
Caisley acknowledged Saturday that many Kansas Citians may struggle as temperatures climb into the mid-80s and power outages continue to plague the metro area.
“We know it’s warming up and going to create difficult conditions for some folks,” he said.
Caisley advised people to be patient and keep their refrigerators and freezers closed to better preserve food as crews continue to work on fallen power lines.
Their priority per company policy, he said, has been to restore power to hospitals and water treatment plants first, with smaller outages being repaired as workers become available.
Wolf Creek station, the site of a nuclear power plant in Burlington, Kansas, has also suffered outages to its 340 kilowatt transmission line. Four or five spans of transmission were taken out during the storm, Caisley said, forcing them to power down the facility to 60% of its normal energy capacity.
“It is stable,” he said. “We expect to have that back up later this afternoon.”
As of Saturday afternoon, Caisley said there are no concerns about having enough electricity for their customers.
He asked customers experiencing outages to leave a report on the company’s website.
