Central Illinois Arctic Cold Blast Dec 18 2008

Ameren Illinois: http://www.illinoisoutage.com

Lights were restored to more than 136,000 homes and businesses as Ameren Illinois restored power in the wake of a fierce December 2008 ice storm with extremely high arctic winds.

The storm that began on Dec. 18, 2009 coated power lines and trees with up to three quarters of an inch of ice in a path that extended from Warsaw east through Macomb, Peoria, Bloomington, Lincoln, Paxton and Watseka. The ice storm damage was compounded by winds of 20 to 30 mph and stronger gusts several days later causing thousands of additional outages.

Nearly 1,500 Ameren Illinois' personnel and contractor staff worked 16-hour shifts to turn the lights back on. Their work was made more difficult by near zero temperatures and wind chills that reached minus-30 degrees.

Support personnel provided field workers with a total of 13,241 meals and 1,497 motel rooms; equipment used in the service restoration effort consumed more than 43,000 gallons of fuel; and four of the six Ameren Illinois' storm trailers were deployed during the restoration effort.

The Storm Trailers are mobile storerooms, stocked with the material field crews need to get the lights back on. The trailers can be moved to central staging sites to provide essential materials areas with the greatest damage.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Ameren
• Illinios
• Utilities
• AmerenCILCO
• AmerenIP
• AmerenCIPS
• Peoria
• Washington
• Metamora
• December
• 2008
• ice
• storm
• electricty
• outages