Some Iowans still without power

HARLAN, Iowa -- Hundreds of rural residents in southwest Iowa have been without power since Wednesday.

As of Monday morning, 823 Iowa electric cooperative power users were still without power.

The Nishnabotna Valley Rural Electric Company serves mainly Pottawattamie and Shelby counties, but also delivers power to Cass and Crawford county customers. As of Monday, 525 users were without power.

It is not from lack of effort.

Mary Johnson, director of marketing and information, said the REC contracted six workers from Minnesota on Thursday, Christmas Eve, to help with the outage.

"They were stranded in their trucks near Odebolt," Johnson said. "We had to get the state to plow them out to get down here Christmas Day."

The outage is the result of "ice, ice and more ice," Johnson said. Ice has been found 3 to 5 inches thick on power lines. Then, trees weighted by the ice have snapped onto power lines, causing more problems.

Along with broken poles and downed lines, repair crew face the difficulty of getting their trucks through snow-covered rural roads.

Johnson said Monday that 10 more workers have been brought up from Missouri to assist with the cascade of outages.

"One of our major problems is that the transmission lines to the substations are down," she said.

REC customers without power should call (712) 755-2166 or (800) 234-5122 to report an outage.

Nishnabotna Valley REC has 1,400 miles of lines and serves six counties in Iowa.

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