Widespread power outages continue across Greene County.

Alliant Energy Spokesperson Melissa McCarville tells Raccoon Valley Radio there were 80,000 customers in Iowa and Wisconsin that were impacted by several power outages from severe thunderstorms and tornadoes Wednesday night. She notes that everything from the distribution to transmission lines have been worked on by their crews since it was safe to do so Wednesday night, following the storms.

“They’re working as quickly and as safely as possible to get all service restored. But Jefferson is a priority community for us right now. We do have a goal that the majority of customers are restored at least by the end of the day tomorrow.”

As of 11:45am Thursday, about 2,638 Greene County Alliant Energy customers and 344 Guthrie County customers were without power. McCarville encourages those without power to check their outage website at alliantenergy.com/outage for estimates of when power will be restored.      

Midland Power Cooperative Director of Communications Ryan Henn says there is extensive transmission line damage in Greene County that is hampering their efforts to re-energize six area substations.

“And the bad news is that those transmission lines are anticipated to take up to several days to be completed. The good news is, once those repairs are done, we expect that the majority of our members will be able to be brought back online when we are able to re-energize the substations in Greene County that are currently offline. We have also additional brought in extra crews from out of the area to help us in our efforts, primarily obviously if there’s extensive damage across the service territory but Boone County and Greene County were the two hardest hit.”

As of 11:45am, Midland Power reports 555 customers were without power. Henn encourages their customers to check out midlandpower.coop/outages for more information about the current power outages in the area. Several locations in Greene County have been designated as warming shelters. This includes Scranton Community Center, the Shriver Community Center in Paton and Wild Rose Casino in Jefferson. These locations will be open through the day and used to charge any electronic device or who need electricity for medical equipment.