Tornado aftermath: Inside the challenging mission to bring light back to Poplar Bluff and beyond

Municipal Utilities and Ozark Border started Saturday with more than 13,000 customers without power because of the Friday, March 14 tornado system.

By Monday evening, that number was less than 1,200. That was due to the dedicated lineman from both utilities as well as a tremendous show of support from outside help.

More than 60 additional linemen came to help the two utilities through the weekend, officials from both reported.

Poplar Bluff outages were down to about 150 by Monday evening, from a high of nearly 3,000 over the weekend.

“Of those, 120 are homes that are too damaged and not really safe to restore power to,” city manager Robert Knodell explained Monday evening before the city council convened. “Realistically, of customers in habitable homes, we’re down to 30.

“Those are 30 with pretty difficult situations. Municipal Utilities expects they should have power back by Wednesday.”

The city utility had a lot of poles to change out, which was time-consuming, noted Lyndell Coleman of Municipal Utilities.

“There are a lot of services down that just feed individual houses, and those will be the last ones we go to because we got to get all of our primary back up first,” Coleman said Saturday.

Ozark Border had reduced its outages to less than 1,000 by Monday evening, from a high of 10,000. They had cut the number in half by Saturday afternoon.

About 400 of those left were in Butler County, with 240 in Carter, 190 in Ripley, 125 in Wayne and six in Stoddard.

“Access has been a real difficult issue with this one,” General Manager David Schremp noted late Saturday.

Linemen contended with pitch black, rain, wind, and blocked roads to reach broken poles and lines. Many of these were entangled in fallen trees and other debris. In another complication, OBEC’s supplier lost power to four substations. It will be impossible to know if some lines are truly fixed until power is restored.

Schremp made the difficult decision Saturday to pull crews back in at dark, noting exhaustion and conditions would make it too dangerous to continue work at that point.

Many had worked a full day before being called out last night and had not rested since then.

“We’re going to get a good night’s rest and tackle it tomorrow with our reinforcements,” Schremp said Saturday.

Four regional co-ops from outside the disaster zone supplied between 22-24 linemen for Ozark Border.

An additional 40 linemen came to assist Poplar Bluff, bringing with them 15 bucket trucks, eight digger derricks, and one backyard machine.

The city help came from the towns of Springfield, Nixa, Monett, and Hannibal in Missouri and Conway and Paragould in Arkansas.

Reporting by DAR staff Samantha Tucker and Donna Farley.