EDWARDSVILLE – A total of 877 customers in Edwardsville, 855 in Collinsville, 534 in Granite City and 1,600 in Columbia remain without power as of 5 p.m. Monday, Ameren Illinois spokesperson Brian Bretsch said.
Bretsch said Ameren Illinois is doing everything it can to fully restore power to the area. Statewide, more than 3,000 Ameren Illinois line, contractor and support personnel are engaged in cleaning up remaining power outages from last weekend’s severe thunderstorms statewide.
Bretsch also said Ameren workers have worked around the clock in the restoration efforts for three days.
In a released statement from Ameren Illinois, the company said: ”We have restored nearly all of the outages caused by the initial derecho that impacted a wide section of the region on Thursday. Today’s work focuses on restoring outages from that second wave of severe weather,” said Lenny Singh, Chairman and President, Ameren Illinois. “We know this has been a challenging time for our customers and no one wants to be without power. Thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding.”
Clear skies and no severe weather threats will help the pace of restoration in the region as crews work to clean up the remaining outages in the territory. Champaign, Madison, Monroe, Vermillion, St. Clair and Macon counties have the most remaining outages.
Bretsch said crews will be out again on Tuesday, July 4, working on the restoration efforts and the hope is to have most in the region still out of service restored by sometime Tuesday.
Bretsch pointed out one woman came out and gave workers a bag of ice to help them cool off in the hot humidity of today. He said gestures like that one means so much to the Ameren personnel in difficult conditions.
See the Ameren outage map for a list of current outages – www.ameren.com/outagemap
