Metro Businesses, Homes Spend Day Without Power After Powerful Storm

Major storms moving through the metro likely woke you up early Monday morning. Thousands were left in the dark without electricity, and high winds and heavy rain made a long day of repairs for OG&E crews.

At the peak of the storm, 24,000 OG&E customers lost power, including a large shopping center of businesses near Czech Hall and I-40, which had to remain closed most of the day.

The torrential downpour led to flooding and numerous water rescues, as well as wind damage.

Discovery Church in Yukon suffered the worst of it. The building, which is already undergoing renovations, was pummeled on its facade and scaffolding from the construction crashed to the ground.

“It just hits that scaffolding harder than it does any of the rest of it as it makes it around the corner, and the wind shear just puts an excessive amount of force on those ties that are tied into the wall, and it came down,” Dave Alexander, a contractor working on the job, said of the wind.

OG&E reports most of the damage its customers experienced also came from high winds, with trees falling into homes and knocking over power lines.

“A lot of times when we have an outage it might be at a substation. Recently we’ve had some of those. Those usually mean it’s a circuit. We can get a couple thousand people back on fairly quickly,” OG&E Spokesperson Kathleen O’Shea said.

This time was different, however. Major businesses and restaurants along Czech Hall bared handwritten apologies to customers during the lunch hour, as crews worked diligently to install a number of brand new poles.

OG&E even had to stop showing an estimated restoration time on their online outage map because they simply did not know.

“We’re having to actually go into the yard, find the transformer, see where the issue is. It just takes a lot longer,” O’Shea explained.

The company is bringing in tree crews to help cut away branches as needed, and contractor crews are on hand to provide additional manpower.

For anyone still without power, OG&E crews are making the rounds and ask for your patience.

The company is hoping to restore power to most of its customers by 9 p.m. Monday, but says power should be restored for all, by noon Tuesday.