OG&E Crews Work To Restore Power To El Reno Residents

Five days after the Thanksgiving weekend ice storm, hundreds in hard hit El Reno remain without power. 

Slowly but surely the power is being restored but it’s going to take some time. It’s not only a matter of tree branches coming down and breaking wires, it’s entire power poles that have been taken down by the storm.

11/28/15 Related Story: El Reno Residents Speak Out About Ice Storm Damage

For the first time in a long time, it's back to fun and games at the Drew household in El Reno. Crews got the juice back on Tuesday morning after five days of the family living in the dark.

“You know, it was very dark. It was very dark and eerie, but cold. My house got down to 49 degrees,” said Tara Drew.

El Reno was one of the harder hit areas by the ice storm. At the height of the outages almost the whole town about 5,000 homes, were without power.  Crews have whittled that number down to about 1,500 homes.

“Which is a lot higher than we wanted it to be, but our crews are out and we have 1,300 people working on this,” said Christine Dukeman, OG&E.

And this is what those people are dealing with. Power poles snapped like twigs.  Transformers sit in the dirt. And there are miles and miles of damaged power lines.

“As we peel back the onion we see a lot more damage. A lot of physical damage.  So our poles, our lines, are down. A lot of trees down obviously,” said Dukeman. “So, the damage is just much more extensive than we thought.”