SWEPCO: All Good Up Here, but What About Down South?

SWEPCO's Michael Corbin talks about putting the finishing touches in restoring power to the ArkLaTex and the remaining major task that remains in rebuilding to the south.

Corbin begins by saying that, at least in our part of the state, "We are good to go from storm outages in the Shreveport area and east Texas. Crews are still out doing a little clean up work...we're all back to normal up here."

But, he adds, there are still problems remaining to the south where storm damage was much more extensive. "If you go down to the Natchitoches area - although the city of Natchitoches has been restored - there are about 200 outages in outlying areas."

Corbin also urges that anyone in that area without power contact SWEPCO and update them on their current condition.

And with the major outages comes a major expense, in man-hours, equipment and taking care, day-to-day, of a couple thousand workers from outside the area. And as of now, no specific dollar amount has been attached to the storm. "We know it's pretty major," Corbin says, "When you have to house, feed, supply and fuel 3,000 extra workers and mobilize them over such a wide region those costs begin to add up. (The project) has been massive. It's unbelievable."

"When you think that just a week ago there were 195,000 people without power in our service area alone and now we're down to under 2,500, that's a huge achievement."