Ameren Illinois field and contract crews worked overnight to restore 44,000 customer outages resulting from a severe thunderstorm that impacted the Metro East and Southern Illinois yesterday. As of 8 a.m., the total outage count was down to approximately 4,200 remaining customers.
Resources from throughout the Ameren Illinois service territory and contractors from Tennessee were called in to assist in repairing the damage to the electric delivery infrastructure. Strong winds, with reported gusts up to 70 mph, felled trees and brought down 15 sub-transmission lines in the Metro East. Crews concentrated on repairing these larger feeder lines first before moving to local distribution poles in residential neighborhoods. The Ameren Illinois Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was activated at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday to coordinate restoration efforts.
The largest concentration of remaining outages is in the Madison County community of Marine and in the communities of Alton, Belleville, Hillsboro, Mount Vernon, and Centralia.
Estimated safe restoration times are approximated as follows:
Alton, 5 p.m.
Belleville, 4 p.m.
Centralia, 3 p.m.
Hillsboro, 2 p.m.
Marine, 9 p.m.
Mount Vernon, 3 p.m.
Information about remaining outages can be found at AmerenIllinois.com/outages. Customers and media can also receive timely updates on outage restoration, and storm safety information, by following the Ameren Illinois news feed at Twitter.com/AmerenIllinois and Facebook.com/AmerenIllinois.
About Ameren Illinois
Ameren Illinois delivers energy to 1.2 million electric and 816,000 natural gas customers throughout central and southern Illinois Our service territory covers more than 1,200 communities and 43,700 square miles. Our mission is to power the quality of life. For more information, visit AmerenIllinois.com. Follow us on Twitter @AmerenIllinois and Facebook.