Published: June 07, 2008 01:15 am            

Crews working to bring electricity back after storms

Electricity slowly was coming back on Friday throughout northwest Oklahoma as communities recovered from severe storms that ripped through the area Thursday.

Roads closed due to high water and downed power poles and lines were reopened, and people were cleaning up damage caused by strong wind.

The city of Fairview, though, remained without power Friday evening, said City Manager Dale Sides. Power went out Thursday night and came back on briefly Friday afternoon before going out again, he said.

Western Farmers Electric Cooperative, the wholesale power supplier and transmission service provider for Fairview Utilities Authority and Alfalfa Electric Cooper-ative, lost several high-voltage transmission structures north of Cherokee, as well as the transmission line coming into Fairview.

Sides said Fairview residents are waiting for Western Farmers crews and materials to arrive to make repairs.

“We’re just sitting here playing the waiting game,” he said.

The city’s water fields are south of town, and Cimarron Electric Cooperative provides electricity for the pumps, so Fairview residents have water, he said.

Ron Shafer, manager of operations for Alfalfa Electric Cooperative, said “all the easy stuff” had been restored in Alfalfa County and about 15 to 25 homes still needed to have electricity restored.

“We’re getting quite a bit of the power back,” he said.

At the height of the outages as many as 5,000 Alfalfa Electric customers may have been without power, he said.

Shafer said he didn’t have a firm number, but more than 160 power poles were downed in storms Tuesday and Thursday. Workers had not replaced all the poles brought down Tuesday, he said, before Thursday’s strong winds toppled more.

He is hopefully all customers will have electricity by tonight.

The story was the same elsewhere. Cimarron Electric Cooperative was working to restore customers primarily in the Canton area, and OG&E Electric Services was reducing the number of customers left without power.

By 8 p.m., OG&E System Watch was reporting no outages in northwest Oklahoma involving at least 50 customers.

A series of strong storms with straight-line wind up to 80 mph whipped across northwest Oklahoma Thursday night, knocking out power, toppling trees and power poles and causing some flooding.

Alfalfa County Undersher-iff Dennis Frisk said wind between 80 and 100 mph ripped through the county, downing power poles and trees and destroying several barns.

“We have lost several barns, five to six, and six to seven other buildings that had damages to them,” he said.

Boyde Highfill, who lost a building just west of Cherokee to the storms, also lost equipment he had stored in hopes of saving it from the bad weather.

“Looked like it was going to storm, so we ran and got all the tractors inside,” he said. “It is a mess, but nobody got hurt, so we’ll live through it and start again.”

Highfill said the 4-year-old building cost about $40,000 to build, but because of the rising costs of metal it will take between $50,000 to $70,000 to rebuild.

He had stored three tractors, two bailers and two swingers in the building before it was destroyed by the storm.

“We’ll take it apart piece by piece to get the tractors out,” Highfill said. “I think the little bailer is ruined.”

Mike Honigsberg, director of Garfield County and city of Enid Emergency Management, said the county as a whole was spared a lot of damage, although the Hillsdale area took a hard hit, with some barns suffering some damage.

“They got some pretty strong winds,” he said.

Roads and highways across the area were reopened Friday after being closed Thursday night.

U.S. 64 from Cherokee north to Oklahoma 11 was reopened at 5:15 p.m. Friday. It had been closed because power poles and lines were down across the road, according to Oklahoma Highway Patrol. The U.S. 64 and Oklahoma 11 junction east and west had been reopened about 3 p.m. after being closed for 10 hours be-cause of downed power lines.

U.S. 81 between Pond Creek and Medford was reopened at 5 p.m., according to OHP. It had been closed due to flooding in Jefferson.

According to the Oklahoma Mesonet weather reporting site, the Lahoma station recorded 4.3 inches of rainfall from Thursday’s storms, the largest amount of rainfall recorded in the state. Medford’s station recorded 3.39 inches, Fairview’s station recorded 2 inches and the Breckinridge station recorded 1.3 inches.

The heavy rain likely has had some effect on crops in the area, but the extent of damage is not yet known, officials said.

Jeff Bedwell, extension educator for Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service in Garfield County, said there were reports of hail damage to corn to the west.

“If there was corn damage, I’m sure there was wheat damage,” he said.

Bedwell said there were no firm figures on crop damage, but standing water should have an impact.

“How much of the crop is involved is hard to say,” he said.

He said some areas received about 5 inches of rain.

“I actually saw wheat under water this morning,” Bedwell said.

Jim Rhodes, of Major County Extension Office, said most producers in Major County “lucked out” with the storms.

“There’s probably some light damage out there, but I haven’t heard of any major damages,” Rhodes said. “I think we got by relatively good in comparison. We don’t have a lot of wheat down.”

He said some producers were planning to have crop adjusters look at possibly damage but total losses are not likely.

“We’re a ways from that,” he said.



Associate Editor Kevin Hassler contributed to this story.