ST. LOUIS – On Sunday, Ameren Missouri crews were out working to restore power to the remaining 15,000 customers without power. Ameren said Saturday’s storm knocked out power to approximately 95,000 customers across the area, and that 1,100 employees were working around the clock to restore power.
The utility company believes everyone will have electricity back by Tuesday at the latest.
“Twenty-four hours we’ve been dealing with no electric,” said Ronnie Ransom. His wife relies on a machine to help her breathe. But without power, he’s been using oxygen tanks.
“The short ones last about 45 minutes. The big ones last about two hours, and I just put the last tank on. I had three tanks. One short one and two of the tall ones,” he said. “My wife is on 100% oxygen. She is a cancer patient, and she’s on the last tank.”
Ransom said he understands the storm is the reason for the outage, but said restoring power is critical for his home.
Ameren said crews are out working as fast as they can.
“These large trees and tree limbs, full-sized trees, it’ll come and break out infrastructure and will either break a pole, or a wooden cross arm that holds the lines up, it’ll break those off and, in some instances, we’ll see 10 in a row where it just breaks the cross arms,” said Ryan Arnold, vice president of energy delivery for Ameren Missouri. He said crews have to prioritize restorations.
“Hospitals, water, water treatment plants, large nursing home-type senior centers, are huge for us. Fire and police departments, making sure they got response, cooling centers, especially during the summer months. Then we prioritize the largest orders down, so that we can restore as many customers as safely as possible,” Arnold said.
In a statement to FOX 2, the Ameren Missouri Communications team said customers with medical equipment should always “seek immediate medical assistance if they are experiencing a medical emergency or medical concerns” during any unplanned outage.
Ameren Missouri offers health and safety options for people to register their medical device, so Ameren can alert them about any planned maintenance that may result in an outage.