25,000-plus still without electricity

BY KENNETH HEARD AND JOHN KRUPA ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-

LITTLE ROCK — More than 25,000 homes and businesses remained without power Monday as residents cleaned up debris left from high winds spawned by Hurricane Ike.

Some might not have their electricity restored until Saturday, utility company spokesmen said.

Winds clocked in excess of 50 and 60 mph toppled utility poles and crashed trees onto power lines Saturday evening and Sunday, causing widespread damage across Arkansas.

The National Weather Service in North Little Rockconfirmed four twisters struck the state Saturday night after the storm moved into Arkansas as a tropical depression. Meteorologist John Robinson said he expects he’ll find evidence of at least two or more additional tornadoes during damage inspections already underway in central Arkansas this week.

So far this year, Arkansas has had 74 tornadoes. An average year has 26 tornadoes, he said.

One person, Nathan Glass, 29, of Fisher in Poinsett County, died when high winds blew a large oak tree into his mobile home Sunday morning, police said.

Two people received minor injuries in Craighead and Hempstead counties, said Tommy Jackson, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.

Homes were damaged in Carroll, Conway, Craighead, Greene, Izard, Lafayette, Lonoke, Miller, Poinsett and Pulaski counties.

“Maybe because it’s sunny, but things are looking a lot better today,” Jackson said. “People are focusing on cleaning up.”

Tornadoes were confirmed by weather service teams in Cabot, near Glen Rose in Hot Spring County, in Garland County, and in Houston in Perry County. Each were rated as Enhanced Fujita-1 twisters with winds between 86 and 110 mph.

About 28,655 Entergy Arkansas customers remained without power late Monday night.

That’s down from the peak of 179,000 over the weekend, hitting more than one-fourth of the 684,000 customers of Arkansas’ largest utility.

By comparison, the ice storms of December 2000 knocked power out to 230,000 homes statewide. The remnants of Hurricane Gustav, which struck Arkansas during the first week of September, caused about 96,219 power disruptions.

Mirroring Gustav, remnants of Hurricane Ike hit the Hot Springs area the hardest, where 15,942 were still without power late Monday night.

There were also 3,652 customers without electricity in Batesville, 2,292 in Little Rock, 3,114 in Harrison, 1,153 in Malvern, 1,354 in Walnut Ridge and 1,590 in Conway, according to Entergy Arkansas late Monday night. The rest of the power disruptions are scattered across the state.

It may be Saturday before all Hot Springs customers are back on line, said Hugh McDonald, president and chief executive officer of Entergy Arkansas.

McDonald said the company has studied the possibility of “hardening” its power systemagainst severe weather by installing thicker power lines, erecting concrete poles or burying distribution lines.

But the options are largely cost-prohibitive, both for the company and the customer.

For example, it would cost Entergy Arkansas customers about $1,200 each to convert from an overhead to underground power system, said Dennis Singletary, the utility’s director of customer service.

“You have to balance the benefits with the cost to the customers,” he said. “These are abnormal events.”

McDonald said all customers should have their power restored by today in Conway and Pine Bluff; by Wednesday in Little Rock, Searcy and El Dorado; by Thursday in Walnut Ridge, Mountain Home, Harrison and Batesville; by Friday in Magnolia; and by Saturday in Hot Springsand Malvern.

Southwestern Electric Power Co. said about 1,500 homes and businesses in Springdale, Fayetteville, Ashdown, De Queen and Nashville remained without power Monday evening. The utility said an additional 7,800 customers were without powerMonday evening in Texarkana, Ark., and Texarkana, Texas. A breakdown of the two border cities was unavailable. The utility has about 113,000 customers in western Arkansas.

By 2 p.m. Sunday, the last North Little Rock Electric customer had power back on, said Mike Russ, general manager of that city’s utility company.

“We anticipated the bad weather,” he said. “We were ready and we jumped on it.”

Trees were toppled throughout the city, he said, but most were felled in higher elevations like Park Hill.

North Arkansas Electric Cooperative utility crews had restored power to most of its customers by Monday, said spokesman Mel Coleman. Fewer than 400 homes remained without electricity in Sharp and Izard counties, he said.

“We’re down to getting customers back on one person at a time,” he said.

Because of the rural areas in north-central Arkansas where the cooperative serves, and because of the wide path of damages, it could take crews until Friday or Saturday to complete work, he said.

“We’ve had employees working here all their careers,” Coleman said. “They said this is the worst widespread outage they’ve ever seen. If a tornado did damage, it’d be in one area. There was damage in all 2,400 square miles that we serve.”

On Sunday, 14,000 of thecooperative’s 33,000 customers were without power, he said.

Damages to utility poles and power lines were estimated at $110,000, Coleman said.

Gusty winds began blasting the state Saturday evening as the remains of a weakened Hurricane Ike cut through Arkansas. An upper-level low-pressure trough met Ike, which was downgraded to a tropical depression when it entered Arkansas, and helped move it out of the state quicker.

“The system was big,” National Weather Service meteorologist Chuck Rickard of North Little Rock said of Hurricane Ike. “But, rather than set up like [Hurricane] Gustav, it got out quick.”

Gustav, which lingered over the state for two days earlier this month, produced more rains, he said.

Gustav had already soaked the ground and loosened the soil, causing trees to be more easily uprooted during Saturday and Sunday winds, he said.

A 20-foot-tall tulip tree fell Saturday night, blocking the entrance to the Martin Luther King Enrichment Center in Little Rock.

“I’m standing on the porch [of the center] today, and you can’t even see me with the tree down,” said Lela Brown, director of the center. The tree was planted in 2000 and produced its first yellow tulip-shaped blossoms earlier this summer.

Brown said she called the Arkansas Forestry Commission to see if someone could brace the tree back up.

“I hope it can be saved,” she said.

Robinson and other meteorologists toured Perry County early Monday to determine if damages there were from a tornado. He found evidence of one that cut a 1.5-mile path that toppled trees near Houston.

He expects to spend the week inspecting damages.

The record for the most tornadoes in Arkansas was 1999 when the National Weather Service confirmed 107 twisters.

The weather service recorded 67 mph wind gusts at the Izard County Fairgrounds in Melbourne on Sunday morning. Newport reported a 61 mph gust and Harrell Field in Camden recorded a 56 mph gust.

Jackson said Monday afternoon that it was too early to determine if any Arkansas county is eligible for state or federal disaster aid.

He said Department of Emergency Management teams are ready to do damage assessments if asked to. He said that because the damage was widespread across the state, rather than centralized in one area, there might not be enough loss to qualify for aid.

Front Section, Pages 1, 4 on 09/16/2008