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Midwest storm outages to last several days


POSTED: 12:39 p.m. EST, December 4, 2006

St. Louis-based utility: "several more days" without power• 296,000 customers in Missouri, Illinois still without power• Temps expected to hover near freezing; will drop again at night• Massive wintry storm hit nation's heartland Thursday
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ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AP) -- Hundreds of thousands of Missouri and Illinois residents who have endured five days without power were still waiting Monday in dangerously cold conditions as temperatures hover in the teens.
An official with St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. said he expects it will be "several more days" before the utility can fully restore power.
"We've had some ice storms before. This one puts them to shame," said Ron Zdellar, vice president of energy for AmerenUE, who has worked for the company for 35 years.

Ameren had restored power to 50,000 customers in the previous 15 hours, it said Monday. Despite those efforts, 296,000 customers in Missouri and Illinois were still without electricity.
Temporary help has come from 14 states, but even as crews put in 16-hour days, cold temperatures, icy poles, downed lines and brittle trees were making the restoration process a difficult one following Thursday night's ice storm.
"We knew when this thing hit, it would be far different from anything we've seen before," Zdellar said.
The National Weather Service was not forecasting additional snow or ice in the affected region, but temperatures were expected to hover around freezing and to drop lower again overnight.
"It looks like it's going to be dry, thankfully, for the next few days," said meteorologist Jim Sieveking, based in the eastern Missouri community of Weldon Spring.
He said temperatures Monday night would be about 5 degrees higher than Sunday night, but still in the teens.
"If you're sitting inside your house without heat, it'll feel just as cold," he said.
Emergency responders urged people to get out of homes without power and not to get creative by trying to heat their homes with unconventional methods, such as turning on stoves powered by natural gas.
Missouri recorded seven weather-related deaths since Thursday's storm. Four were traffic related; one was due to a fire and two were carbon-monoxide deaths. An additional four deaths were being investigated as possibly weather related, said Susie Stonner, a state emergency management spokeswoman.