BEATRICE – Beatrice Electric crews spent a 16-hour day Saturday, restoring power to areas that lost electricity during the severe weather that hit the area Saturday morning.


Electric Superintendent Pat Feist said high winds breaking off branches and sections of trees came down on power lines, creating fires and causing outages.
"We actually had one of our 34.5KV lines coming into town, trip off in that first round of storms, Saturday morning. At the worst part of it, we had two customers shy of three thousand off line. By Saturday night when I sent the guys home, we worked just over 16 hours and we had all but 33 customers back on."


The east side of Beatrice and areas to the north were the worst hit, but Feist said a limb just north of West Court that came down on a line, produced a shorter power outage.  "I had everybody who was available, out. There were a couple of guys gone, but everybody else in the department was out."


Most downed lines had blown fuses and were not energized, except for one instance where there was a wire still live on the ground…but he says a crew addressed that problem, quickly.


"A lot of damage we had was in what we consider as no-access alleys. It made the recovery time a little bit longer....you can't get trucks to it...so you're using a different type of equipment or working everything off poles, so it took a little bit longer to get some of that stuff back on."


As of early Monday, Feist said there were only three meters still without power, but they were connections to homes that are currently vacant. Otherwise, power has been completed restored.