Desi Hunter has missed a lot of special days with his family, but he’s never missed Christmas.
In his 13-year-career with Entergy, the Conway-based operations lineman has missed birthdays, anniversaries, and even this year’s Fourth of July.
Sitting with his family Tuesday afternoon, Hunter said he was hoping that his record of no calls on Christmas Day would continue. But looking at the weather, he was doubtful.
“I think with the ice already accumulating, well, it looks like trouble,” Hunter said. “We’ll see what happens.”
And then the call came.
Entergy spokesman Sally Graham said the company’s employees are on call forall weather events, and as in the case of the snow and ice storms on Christmas Day, which knocked out power to nearly 265,000 customers throughout the state, out-of-state contractors and employees of other utilities also wait for calls.
Entergy, like most power utilities, is enrolled in multiple mutual-assistance groups, which agree to send help to a participating member when severe weather knocks out power in the member’s service area. The enrollment also requires Entergy to go to the aid of other members.
“No utility can restore the power as quickly and as safely as the public wants,” Graham said. “When a storm comes in that’s so massive, that dumps a lot of wind on us ... well, we’re always preparing for the worst andhoping for the best.”
After Tuesday’s storm that dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the state, Entergy put out a call for 3,500 utility workers to help with restoration efforts.
The utility company placed a similar call for last week’s windstorm that severed power to roughly 50,000 homes and businesses statewide, and more than 500 contract workers from Mississippi and Louisiana answered, Graham said. Only about one in 10 of those contractors was available for the next job - the same one that beckoned Hunter.
“I got most of Christmas in yesterday,” Hunter said Wednesday. “I was in Texarkana visiting my in-laws when I got the call last night.”
Hunter said he was scheduled for vacation until the New Year.
“Right now, anybody ... if they’re on vacation and they work for Entergy, they’ve been called in,” Graham said.
Heavy ice accumulation accounted for a good part of the damage, mostly in Pulaski and Garland counties, Graham said.
“Dozens of [circuit] breakers are frozen from the ice,” she said. “There’s ice clinging on wire, trees falling into the wires ... broken poles.”
But, Graham said, utility companies haven’t seen the worst yet.
“With an ice storm, frequently we’ll get people back on today,” she said. “But after it freezes and starts melting again tomorrow, that melt will then loosen up the trees andlimbs into the wires.”
While some crews began damage assessments Wednesday, others worked to find food and housing for the contract workers, which proved difficult as area hotels filled up with stranded motorists and restaurants remained closed for the holidays.
“It’s all kind of happening in harmony,” Graham said. “We want to make sure that when the teams come in, all they need to do is work a 16-hour day.”
But Wednesday served mostly as a planning day as Hunter and other Entergy workers awaited the arrival of the contract workers.
Kay Williams, who maintains data for Entergy’s Searcy office, spent Christmas night and Wednesday dispatching scouts and linemen to power failures.
Entergy has hit a few snags, Williams said, as the utility did not have any trucks with fourwheel drive in the city, and ice- and snow-weighted trees continued to crack throughout the day, keeping 8,000 homes and businesses in Searcy without power.
Entergy officials are hoping to restore power to up to 80 percent of Searcy-area customers by this evening, and once it’s all restored, they’ll relocate the utility workers stationed there, Williams said.
“It’s just going to take time and man-hours,” she said.
The roles were reversed for some Entergy workers who went east a few months ago to help out in the wake of superstorm Sandy, Hunter said.
“There’s always a warm reception for assisting utilities,” he said. “They [customers] look at host companies as not getting the power restored. What they don’t understand is the host utility’s job is to make sure we get in the right places to get everything scouted.”
Hunter managed a team of linemen in Maryland, then in Newark, N.J., he said.
He led his crew to each work location and ensured they did their job safely, and he’s likely to do the same in the next few days, he said.
“My duty today was to get several of the clerks from Conway to Little Rock to what we call the ‘war room,’” Hunter said.
Reinforcements arrived Wednesday afternoon, and they’ll start receiving assignments to work today, Hunter said. He briefed the contract linemen in Conway, and some started work right away.
“Some of it [repairs] has started,” he said. “Our linemen are doing some switching to get what they can on.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/27/2012