KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Utility crews have been working the last 36 hours to get power restored to customers. At the peak of the outage, KCP&L had 106,000 customers without power and BPU in KCK had another 20-thousand in the dark. As of Wednesday afternoon, KCP&L and BPU say they have about 90 percent of people who lost power back up and running again. And they say for those who are still waiting for light you’ll probably be restored by some time late this evening. Still it has been hard on those who have been in the dark since the storm hit.
“I can’t see to cook or anything,” says KCK resident Pamela Ramsey, “I couldn’t even have coffee this morning.”
Ramsey has been struggling without coffee and in her dark house since 7:30 Tuesday morning. She doesn’t have a car so she’s stuck here at home and hoping the power will be back on soon, since she’s struggling to stay warm now.
“I’m freezing,” she said, “me and my three dogs snuggled up in the chair with a big old heavy blanket.”
Over on the Missouri side, Maryanne Lillig says she’s very concerned about her parents who are in their 80s.
“They’re very independent,” said Lillig, “they want to be here and do it on their own and we try to provide that but at some level you step in and think is that best and are they safe?”
Her parents have a generator so the house has heat, but as a doctor who specializes in the elderly, Maryanne is concerned about any older folks who go without power for too long.
“If they’re on oxygen or medications people here are at risk,” Lillig said.
Her mother Frances says she’s glad the generator helps warm up the place but worries every time her 82 year old husband drives in this weather to get more gas. She hopes the power company will really look at this outage and see what they can do to improve their service and prevent these kind of lengthy outages.
“We must have a bad transformer behind our house, that’s all we can figure out,” she said, “we don’t know why it happens but it happens a lot.”
For updated information about KCP&L’s outages:
http://www.kcpl.com/storm/storm_update.html
For an interactive map of the BPU outages in KCK:
http://www.kcpl.com/storm/storm_update.html
