Crews work around the clock repairing storm chaos
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- As another round of potentially damaging weather rolls in, crews are still diligently working to clear areas impacted by Sunday’s storm.
Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) communications representative, Michael Bianski, said that storm was the second worst he’s seen in terms of customers count since he started the job 12 years ago.
Tues. afternoon, Bianski was at the scene of a restoration where a large tree had fallen in the storm on top of several structures, damaging a house, and tearing up power lines.
That work site gave a good example of how long one repair can take, and how many different companies are involved.
“Every single outage, down to every single individual customer out has been assigned to a crew. We’re working through these as fast as we can, it’s just a lot of times, what you’ll run into, especially as you get to the later stages of a major restoration like this, is you can see damage like this that’s only effecting maybe one, two, three homes and as you can see it’s a lot of work to restore just two to three customers,” said Bianski.
Bianski said I&M has a team of meteorologists that lets them know about incoming storms, so they were able to prep for Sun.
“We were able to secure over 1500 external employees that were able to come in here and assist with this storm restoration,” said Bianski.
Some of those out-of-town crews joined the job Bianski was at, which added up to a total of four companies on scene with the external employees, I&M, a tree cutting service, and a crane group, all for one job.
Part of the crew was on scene from about noon to nine p.m. They were able to clear most of the damage as well as restore power before the next storm hits.
“We’re very cognitive of the fact there’s another round of weather coming in, so we’re working to get as much cleaned up as possible by tonight… we’re going to keep working and ensure that once that next round comes through, we’re ready to respond as soon as we can,” expressed Bianski.
In the meantime, he made the very important note to avoid any downed power lines.
“Make sure you’re watching to see if there’s a downed wire anywhere… trees like this can take down lines and hide them, you might not see it, but don’t touch a wire or anything that wire could be touching and that means fences, sheds, tree limbs, just make sure you’re being very, very careful, look around before you start moving anything,” said Bianski.
Fallen tree in South Bend, as crews work to fix damages.