Ice Storm Recap

The year 2025 will long be remembered for the ice storm that plagued most of Southern Illinois with some areas recording over one inch of ice.  The winter storm, officially named Winter Storm Blair, brought significant amounts of freezing rain and ice on January 5^th and followed that with an arctic blast and finished with snow on the 12^th.  This is one of the most damaging storms on record in your Cooperative’s 87-year history.

Your Cooperative began receiving calls from members the afternoon of January 5th and by that evening there were approximately 16,000 members without power.  At that time, all of the Cooperative employees were working on the restoration process and additional Illinois Cooperative crews and contract crews were called in to assist in the restoration process.

The first priority was to restore the damaged 69,000-volt transmission lines that energize your Cooperatives distribution substations from the generation plant located at the Lake of Egypt.  These transmission outages resulted in loss of power to 13 of the Cooperative’s 35 substations.  In order to get these transmission lines energized, line personnel must inspect the numerous miles of transmission line, locate the areas of damage and then begin repairing the facilities.  The icy road conditions along with numerous downed trees across the roads made this process very difficult and time consuming.

By the afternoon of Monday, January 6^th, all 13 of the substations were re-energized and approximately 6,000 members had regained electrical service.  All of your Cooperative employees along with 125 outside line personnel and forestry personnel continued the restoration process by repairing your Cooperative’s distribution facilities.  These personnel were working 16-18 hours per day in very extreme conditions in order to restore power to members.

As the week continued, your Cooperative focused on re-energizing lines that would restore power to as many members as possible.  The number of power restorations was much larger earlier in the week due to working on lines that served a greater number of members.  As the week progressed, the number of power restorations slowed in comparison due to working on lines that served fewer members.  The morning of Friday, January 10^th, the Cooperative had approximately 1,150 outages remaining; however, heavy snow began to fall and blanket the area causing additional outages as well as making travel treacherous for the crews.  Your Cooperative restored power to the last residence on Sunday evening, January 12^th.

At the conclusion of this storm, I would like to thank all of you as Cooperative members and owners for your understanding of the magnitude of this extreme storm, your patience, your assistance and your thank you letters that have been received.  I would also like to thank all of the hard working and dedicated employees, other Illinois Cooperative employees and contractors who made this restoration possible. 

As many of you already know all of my articles normally end with the slogan “We’ll keep the lights on for you.”  However given the magnitude of this severe winter storm, my slogan this month will be “We turned the lights back on for you”.