Only handful lack power, utilities say

Entergy:A few need repairs to homes

Power companies have restored service to nearly all Arkansas homes and businesses affected by the Christmas Day storm, but some Comcast Cable customers in the Little Rock area are still without cable television and Internet service.

As of Tuesday evening, most of the fewer than 300 Entergy Arkansas Inc. customers without power were located in Pulaski County and affected by “new outages not related to the storm,” Entergy spokesman Julie Munsell said.

The remaining customers without power for stormrelated reasons are those who have home repairs to complete before Entergy, the state’s largest electrical utility, can do its part in restoring the service.

“There are some customers who may have sustained damage to their home that must be restored before we can reconnect their power,” Munsell said. “Once work on their end is done, then we do an emergency reconnect, which gets them back online.”

The few customers of First Electric Cooperative who were still without power Monday had their service restored by Tuesday morning, company spokesman Tonya Everhart said.

As many as 265,000 Arkansas customers of various power companies, municipal utilities and state electrical cooperatives had at one point lost service during the storm, which piled as much as 14 inches of snow and iceon parts of the state.

The National Weather Service predicts that the dreary weather has passed for now.

“The next chance of a sign of precipitation may be a week from now,” said John Lewis, senior forecaster for the weather service. “Conditions are improving. There is a little bit of light snow in the north [of Arkansas.] In the next few days you’ll see more sunshine than we’ve seen recently. It is slowly starting to warm up, but temperatures will continue to be below normal heading into the early part of the weekend.”

Munsell said Entergy hasn’t responded to conditions as rough as the past week in Arkansas since 2000. Line workers were working 16-hour shifts, and others worked through the night fueling trucks, preparing lunches and developing work plans.

“It really was a 24/7 operation in total,” Munsell said.

The company called in closeto 4,000 out-of-state workers to help with the repairs, and many of them began heading home Tuesday morning.

Just more than 1,600 out-ofstate workers remain in Arkansas to help with the cleanup, Munsell said. They are stationed across Little Rock, Jacksonville, Pine Bluff, Hot Springs and Malvern. Cleanup is expected to conclude by the end of the week.

With most homes and businesses regaining power, many also have had cable and Internet services restored, but an unreleased number of Comcast customers are still without the services.

“We aren’t providing numbers,” said Mary Beth Halprin, vice president of public relations and community affairs for Comcast’s Central Division.

Halprin said the “vast majority” of Comcast customers in the Little Rock area have regained access to cable and Internet because most disruptions in service were caused by power failures.

Comcast crews “are able to go in and make repairs once the commercial powers are restored and those areas are deemed safe,” Halprin said. “We are always behind [power restoration] in terms of the process.”

She wouldn’t say how many customers had experienced service disruptions due to the storm, but she said employees and contract workers have worked “around the clock” and continued working Tuesday torestore service to customers.

AT&T Arkansas Communication Manager Anita Smith said AT&T’s U-verse customers never lost service during last week’s storm unless it was electricity-related.

“We used generators to power those services until the commercial power was restored,” she said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/02/2013

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