By Anthony Childress

JONESBORO — Thursday brought progress as more utility workers arrived from other areas to help city, county and regional officials repair damage from last week’s devastating ice storm.

In Jonesboro, City Water and Light continues to chip away at remaining areas without power. The Mardis Addition and University Heights subdivisions were turned back on in the past couple of days, as were about 80 homes in north Jonesboro.

“We had another great day (Thursday), and that’s been true for every day since things developed,” CWL’s Kevan Inboden said. “We think we should have most everybody, if not everybody, back online in a week, but there are still problem areas that could take longer to address.”

While a significant number of customers have their power back, CWL estimated that about 40 clusters of homes throughout the city remain in the dark. Inboden said about 99 percent of the system is back up, but there were lingering problems in locations like the west end of Arrowhead Farm and Duncan roads.

“We want to remind our customers to call us if they have an outage,” he said.

In areas still without service, linemen must go in and climb trees and poles and then pull wire up by hand, a tedious process. Another problem has been that recent windy conditions recently have caused other outages.

“We’ve had so many instances of multiple services being disrupted that not only impact City Water and Light but individual customers,” Inboden said.

Craighead Electric Cooperative had an estimated 7,000 customers without power, down from the peak of 18,000 in the immediate aftermath of the storm. On top of that, at least 4,000 utility poles were destroyed.

“As work continues we simply ask for the patience of the members without power,” Brian Duncan, president and CEO of cooperative, said. “Crews are working feverishly but safely to restore power to as many members as possible as quickly as possible.”

Duncan said the focus is still on restoring power to as many people as possible, noting that some may have power while their neighbors do not.

One thing utility providers continue to emphasize is that customers should know that a residence must be able to access power before a meter is re-energized. In order to do that, CE suggests that customers “visually inspect” the weatherhead connected to an electric meter. If damage is detected an electrician must repair it before service resumes.

Entergy status

The number of Entergy Arkansas customers without electricity in Craighead and Mississippi counties continues to drop, Customer Service Manager Paul Brewster said.

“We’re doing pretty good,” he said. “We have less than 200 in the Monette still out and could have most of them back on in the next couple of days. We will then concentrate on the more remote areas and hope to wrap things up by Sunday.”

The Cash area was “probably” one of the hardest-hit areas in western Craighead, Entergy Customer Service Manager David Burnette told The Sun. With roughly half of its customers there still without power, the company expects it to take another week to complete restoration there.

Service is restored to about 85 percent of Entergy customers in the Bono area and 75 percent at Bay.

Brewster said with more than 4,500 workers in Northeast Arkansas progress should go well over the next several days.

“Obviously the most important thing for all of us in working on things is to keep the focus squarely on getting everyone back with power,” he added. “We just have to keep asking our customers to remain patient as we make more progress.”

As CWL works to get the lights back on, city officials are planning to speed up the cleanup. The city has posted a request for proposals from private contractors to remove debris from the city’s rights-of-way. Tony Thomas, special grants coordinator, said the proposed contract would call for removal of approximately 100,000 cubic yards of debris. Contractors must complete the work in 45 days.

The sealed proposals must be turned in to the city’s purchasing office by 2 p.m. Tuesday.

Mayor Harold Perrin hopes the city can award the contract to local vendors, but he noted that Jonesboro will have to follow federal standards, because federal disaster funds will pay for it. Contractors will have to post a performance bond.

anthony@jonesborosun.com