LENEXA, Kan. — Evergy says Friday night’s storm had the largest number of outages during the company’s five-year history.
About 240,000 customers were impacted throughout the duration of the storm as it passed through the Kansas City-metropolitan area. At peak outage, about 186,000 customers were without electricity.
“The restoration is definitely going to stretch through today and probably into tomorrow and possibly even into the first part of the new week,” said Evergy’s chief customer officer Chuck Caisley. “We’ve got hundreds of poles down, we’ve got trees everywhere — this is a big restoration.”
Currently, 2,000 employees are working around the clock for a 24/7 operation, but Evergy thinks full restoration will not be until Monday morning. They are taking operations step by step in phases, tackling critical customers — like hospitals — first, and then moving onto the largest outages.
“By this evening, we’ve asked neighboring utilities in Colorado, Missouri and in Iowa to see if they would send crews down here,” said Caisley. “It’s called mutual assistance, and those crews are now headed our way. By this evening, we’re expected to have at least another 1,000 personnel on-site restoring tonight and beginning tomorrow.”
Marc Ford, a neighbor inside a southern Lenexa subdivision, says he has been waiting with bated breath. As of 11 a.m. Saturday morning, he has been without power for 19 hours.
The storm’s gusty winds blew up his electrical transformer in the backyard.
“The heat that’s gonna happen this afternoon is gonna be bear,” said Ford. “I’ll probably drive around for awhile anyway and charge up my phone and sit in the AC, and since I’m gonna sweat anyway, I’m gonna go to the gym here pretty soon, so what the heck?”
A few blocks down, Mary Kopecky has been suffering from a similar fate. In addition to the power outage, her home is next to a creek, which she said was scary to watch as its water rose to the top of the banks.
“I have all my stuff at my neighbors house right now charging, so I’m ready for tonight, but I think I might go to my daughter’s tonight,” said Kopecky. “Normally, since I’m on the creek side of this neighborhood, I’m attached to the hospital and we don’t get the power outages, but this time we’re the unlucky ones.”
Even within the same neighborhood, on the same block, no two houses are the same. Cheryl Burrows says her power came back around 10 p.m. Friday night. As one of the lucky ones, she is paying it forward.
“I feel bad for them, but I’m glad mine’s on,” said Burrows. “We’ve all offered for them to come to the house if they need something.”
Evergy said one of the unique challenges of this storm was the timing. By the time the storm calmed down, it was dark, and productivity slows down during nighttime.
Caisley asks for patience as employees work through the weekend, and offered added assurance for those most vulnerable.
“We have a medical list that we maintain of customers who need electricity for a medical condition,” said Caisley. “We are aware of that and we try to the best extent possible to help prioritize their restoration.”
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