Roughly 12 hours after the end of the four-day winter storm that rolled across the state, just under 50,000 Arkansans remained without power, primarily in Southern Arkansas.
According to Entergy, as of 12:35 p.m., 33,035 customers were without power. Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas had 21,243 customers without power.
For Entergy, the area with the most outages was Jefferson County with 10,075 outages. No other county had more than 3,117 outages (Dallas County).
Electric Cooperatives' most affected area was Lincoln County with 4,474 customers impacted.
In a 10 a.m. update, Entergy said it had assessed 60% of its affected area. With the aid of a helicopter, it had identified 144 broken poles, 661 spans of downed wire and 15 damaged transformers.
Most of the damage was attributed to trees falling on power lines due to the weight of ice accumulation.
Entergy said roughly 2,800 workers, including help from other states, was involved in the restoration process.
Electric Cooperatives said in a statement released Friday, "Repairs are progressing well. We are dealing with a large amount of downed trees which are blocking roads. We are focused on restoring service to impacted members as quickly and safely as possible.
"Members in remote areas should prepare for multiple day restoration time period."
EARLIER: 82,000 Arkansans left without power after winter storm
A third wave of winter weather raked across the state and left at least 82,000 Arkansans without power on Thursday.
At one point, the National Weather Service in Little Rock extended the ice storm warning for nine counties in Southeast Arkansas, including Jefferson and Drew, to 2 p.m. but by Thursday evening, the warnings had been lifted across the state and temperatures in most areas rose above freezing and the bands of precipitation that brought freezing rain and sleet passed on to the east, a weather service forecaster said.
Meteorologists were still working to finalize ice accumulation numbers, said Willie Gilmore, a senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in North Little Rock, but he thought the storm brought about what meteorologists expected.
"The forecast was generally pretty good," Gilmore said.
South central and southeast Arkansas seemed to have gotten the worst of the winter storm, Gilmore said, with anywhere from one quarter of an inch to half an inch of ice accumulation that affected infrastructure and power lines.
In Central Arkansas, ice accumulation was fairly limited on infrastructure, with Arkansas Department of Transportation workers doing good work to keep slick spots clear, Gilmore said. He said he'd heard of some problems due to ice, especially black ice, mainly during overnight hours.
The sleet mixed in with freezing rain across the state helped keep accumulation limited, Gilmore said, and because temperatures in most areas stayed in the range of 28 to 32 degrees, heat from the sun was able to warm some roads even through cloud cover.
POWER OUTAGES
South Arkansas is also bearing the brunt of power outages.
As of 7 p.m. Thursday, Entergy was reporting 37,713 customers without power across the state. That was down from a peak of roughly 53,000 earlier in the day, but almost double the total of about 25,000 reported at 6 a.m.
A group of other utilities, the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas, reported 33,491 customers without power as of 11:30 a.m.
The overwhelming number of Entergy customers without power are in the southern portion of the state. The counties with the most affected customers were Jefferson (8,323), Drew (6,890) and Ouachita (5,403).
Of the co-op customers, 18,213 were powerless in the C&L Electric Co-Op, along with 5,176 in the Ouachita Cooperative in Camden and 6,052 in the South Central Cooperative in Arkadelphia.
According to the utilities group, C&L Electric of Star City is the hardest hit system with about 85% (18,000) of its 21,399 members without service as of Thursday afternoon. Spokesperson Rob Roedel said the two other utilities' outages are also significant.
Entergy spokesperson Brandi Hinkle and Roedel said they don't have an estimated time for restoration because the damage was still being assessed.
Roedel added that many of the co-op areas without service are sparsely populated.
"We've got a lot of trees and limbs that are falling onto power lines and other equipment," Hinkle said. "That's causing most of the outages because some places got close to a half an inch of ice."
Roedel said the Electric Cooperatives outages are largely related to damaged power delivery infrastructure and trees on power lines. Crews are assessing damage and mapping out power restoration plans.
Hinkle said there were roughly 2,800 Entergy "boots on the ground" working to restore power, "everything from electricians and heavy equipment operators to scouts and vegetation crews."
Roedel said an additional 90 linemen from other electric cooperative across Arkansas had been dispatched to C&L Electric to assist with power restoration efforts.
Hinkle also reported that a tree had fallen on a bucket truck in Pine Bluff, but that no one was hurt.
"We do encourage customers to stay inside and stay safe if there's a lot of ice around their home because ice laden tree limbs and power lines can fall and cause damage to property power lines and especially people," she said.
TRANSPORTATION
Due to the hazards posed by falling trees in the southern portion of the state, the Arkansas Department of Transportation is aiding in the cleanup effort there.
Department spokesperson Dave Parker said it has "diverted crews and moved some of our other bridge maintenance folks and other personnel into that area to help clear the roadways, cut limbs, move debris, operate equipment. We're focusing on a lot of those southeastern counties, Ashley, Chicot, Desha [and] Lincoln County."
On the department's Twitter account, Parker posted a photo of crews working to remove a tree that had fallen on Arkansas 425 in Lincoln County.
"I think that's pretty indicative of that whole area; the southeast just got the brunt of this system last night and, while the roads are in pretty good shape, the trees are coming down on the roads now," Parker said.
Overall, Parker said he was "very proud" of how the transportation department performed over the course of roughly four days of winter weather in the state.
"Five days if you include the planning on Sunday," Parker said. "The pretreatment we did, I believe, paid off because it ended up creating [Wednesday] night that salt water-type solution on a lot of the roadways.
"The salt and the rock salt we put down on Monday [and] Tuesday was still around [Wednesday] night and so it mixed with some of that precipitation and created that salt water on the roadway, and salt water takes a little harder to freeze, so I think it paid off."
But the week of bad weather was a "a pretty good drain on our salt supplies," Parker noted.
"We went into the storm in really good shape. Obviously, it took its toll on this. ... Overall we're still okay, but it was definitely a drain compared to the storm we had the week before in the Northwest, which was a snow maker. That did not require nearly as much [of] the rock-salt."
Speaking of salt, one of the department's plows that was heavy with it tipped over Thursday morning after blowing a tire, according to a tweet posted at 1:06 p.m. The driver wasn't injured though.
"It's a good reminder that our crews have a tough job out there keeping our roads safe. We're grateful to them and all their hard work," the tweet read.
Meanwhile, the Clinton National Airport remained open and operational throughout the winter storm.
As of 9 p.m. Wednesday, its runways and taxiways were wet, and no frozen precipitation had occurred, officials reported.
Nineteen airfield employees were ready to begin treating surfaces as necessary.
Also, nine departing flights were cancelled, with eight delays, and 12 arriving flights were cancelled, with nine delays, on Wednesday.
The airport suggests passengers check their flight status before driving there, on the airport's or on their airline's website.
REOPENINGS/CLOSINGS
State government offices in weather affected areas opened at 10 a.m. Thursday, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
Sanders closed state office buildings, except for critical operations Tuesday and Wednesday, because of poor road conditions in many areas of the state.
The city of Little Rock announced Thursday afternoon that its Public Works department will resume trash collection on Friday.
Crews will collect on the city's normal Friday routes.
Next week, trash collection will continue on regularly scheduled days.
For residents that did not receive trash collection on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday because of the weather, the city will collect additional bagged or contained trash placed beside the garbage bin.
The North Little Rock Sanitation Department said it began working regular Wednesday routes at 11 a.m. Thursday, and worked to complete all of Wednesday's routes and also the regular Thursday routes.
If the crews did not finish all of Thursday's routes, they will complete them today, officials said.
Also, Waste Management is running their regular recycling routes today. They will run Tuesday and Wednesday's routes on Saturday.
BETTER FORECAST
Going into Friday and the weekend, forecasters expected rising temperatures, Gilmore said, with highs reaching the 60s in some areas by Sunday and Monday.
"Typical for Arkansas," Gilmore said.
Ice-laden trees hang low outside Wrightsville on Thursday. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Stephen Swofford)