KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Evergy said it expects the majority of power to be restored for customers in the Kansas City area by Tuesday evening.
Over 140,000 customers lost their power when storms made blew through the area on Saturday night.
Due to the amount of outages, Evergy said it initially anticipated it would take until Wednesday to restore power.
However, the company said it brought in an additional 900 workers — including vegetation clean up and line workers — to assist local crews.
The workers came from other parts of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin.
"It's progressing a little bit better than what we expected, and things are improving so tomorrow evening we hope to have all the lights back on," Corey Miller, regional director of operations for Evergy, said in a press conference.
Miller said most of the outages were caused by trees falling on power lines, and spoke on the challenges it poses for workers attempting to restore power.
"Anytime you have the type of severe weather that we had with 70 plus mile an hour winds, it's going to do a lot of damage to trees," Miller said. "There's only so much that those trees can withstand before they start to have limbs and stuff fall out of them ... the whole tree comes over and takes out poles and lines."
Miller said it's important to stay away from any downed power lines and to consider those lines to be charged.
Evergy said that by 3:30 p.m. on Monday, 90% of customers had their power restored, with 16,000 customers awaiting their lights to be turned back on.
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