'This can take some time': Omaha's power recovery from Wednesday's storm might be days away (2024)

The Omaha Public Power District has called in an army of 1,000 workers to restore power after the Wednesday storm that produced the largest outage in the electrical utility’s history.

The powerful storm that packed hurricane-like 90-mph wind gusts knocked out power to 218,332 OPPD residential and business customers across eastern Nebraska. That’s more than half of the utility’s entire customer base of 412,000.

While the utility made progress Thursday, thanks in part to dozens of crews coming in from neighboring utilities, by 6 p.m., some 104,000 customers remained off the grid. And the effort to turn the lights back on completely will likely stretch on for days.

In the previous record outage — the July 10, 2021 windstorm that left 188,000 OPPD customers in the dark — it took seven days to restore power to everyone.

The timeline now could be similar, around seven to eight days, particularly for outages impacting just a few customers or where there are multiple outage causes, said Wyndle Young, OPPD’s director of customer service.

“So, this can take some time,” Young said.

Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert was among those urging patience, with both OPPD workers and city maintenance crews.

“It was a widespread city event,” she said.

Gov. Jim Pillen signs emergency proclamation

Indeed, the power outages and other property damage were produced by a strong stormfront that extended some 40 miles north to south as it passed through eastern Nebraska, from Bennington in northern Douglas County, through Sarpy County and into Cass.

In addition to the gusts measured at 90 mph, it produced sustained winds of up to 75 mph minutes afterwards. Winds were strong enough to knock down entire power poles.

“If people of Nebraska want to know what a hurricane is like, you got to experience one for about 15 minutes there,” said Eric Hunt, an agricultural meteorology and climate resilience specialist with the University of Nebraska’s extension service.

A Category 1 hurricane, the weakest, features winds of 75 to 95 mph. Given that, Hunt said it was amazing there were no reports of serious injuries.

By the end of the day Thursday, Gov. Jim Pillen signed a proclamation declaring a state of emergency due to the storm damage in Douglas, Sarpy, Cass, Lancaster, Saunders and Washington counties.

The proclamation allows the state’s adjutant general to bring in resources to help and allows use of the Governor’s Emergency Fund to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

In the storm’s wake, OPPD and its helpers weren’t the only ones working.

The chainsaws buzzed throughout the metro as homeowners and city crews tackled the downed trees and limbs that blocked city streets and landed in yards and on homes.

Often it was neighbor helping neighbor as Omahans cut, collected and piled up the tree debris.

To aid in the cleanup, the City of Omaha on Thursday opened up five drop-off locations. By midday, hours-long lines were reported at some locations. By next week, the city will provide curbside debris pickup.

While Shane Petersen was one of hundreds of people who waited hours to drop off debris at Hefflinger Park in northwest Omaha, he didn’t let frustration get to him.

“This is just what you should come to expect when you have a big city and the biggest power outage in the history of the state,” he said. “You’re going to have a lot of damage.”

‘Very deep, dry air mass’ is an ingredient for strong winds

As early as Monday, National Weather Service forecasters had seen the potential for explosive weather in eastern Nebraska Wednesday, including severe thunderstorms and strong winds.

A cold front would be coming through eastern Nebraska amid extremely hot and humid conditions, with heat indexes from combined heat and humidity hitting 110 degrees across the region. That mix of cool air with the warm, extremely moist air was a recipe for potentially strong storms, said Becky Kern, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Valley.

The weather service launched a weather balloon at midday Wednesday that also revealed a large volume of dry air above the humid air, conditions that would make for even stronger updrafts when the cold front came through.

“It was a very deep, dry air mass, and for a scientist that’s one of the things we look at as potential for wind,” Kern said.

The first thunderstorms formed in the Hastings area around 3:30 p.m. and generally tracked east along Interstate 80. And by the time the storm front rolled into Lincoln right as rush hour began, it was 30 miles wide and producing wind gusts measured up to 79 mph.

When the storm reached Omaha just before 6 p.m. amid wailing sirens, wind gusts were clocked at 90 mph. And even after the initial line passed, sustained winds of 50 to 75 mph remained for 20 minutes or more afterwards, Kern said.

The storm weakened somewhat after it crossed the Missouri River, but still produced gusts of 75 mph in western Iowa and 66 mph in Des Moines.

Based on damage reports, it’s possible the storm’s top wind speeds could later be found to have exceeded 90 mph.

“Power poles snapped off, that’s a pretty good gust,” she said.

It also remains to be seen whether the storm will be classified as a derecho, a rare, long-lasting windstorm that’s associated with a band of thunderstorms that move quickly.

While this storm produced strong enough winds to be classified as a derecho, it’s unclear whether the storm had the duration that’s part of the definition, Kern said. Either way, it will still go down as a powerful squall, she said.

“These are big events,” she said.

Power crews ‘ready and willing to pitch in’

After the storm passed, OPPD crews worked through the night and by Thursday morning had restored power to about a third of affected customers. By noon, almost half had power, and then just over half by the afternoon.

OPPD said it had more than 150 crews working on the outages by Thursday, aloft in bucket trucks throughout the metro. Not only was it all hands on deck for OPPD line crews, there were also local electrical contractors and crews from utilities with which OPPD has mutual aid agreements.

Even more crews were on the way. By later this week, OPPD expects to have 330 crews on the job — that’s almost 1,000 workers.

“That includes line crews, construction crews, tree trimming crews, both within the Omaha area and through our mutual aid partners,” OPPD’s Young said.

OPPD spokesperson Jodi Baker said the 1,000 workers would be double the number that have worked previous storm-related outages.

Unlike with the July 2021 storm, many neighboring utilities were not as heavily impacted this time. That fortunately has left them “ready and willing to pitch in,” Baker said.

Nebraska Public Power District, Loup Power District in Columbus and the municipal electricity provider in Grand Island are among those with crews already on the ground in Omaha.

Young said when any one customer’s power is restored depends on location, level of damage and impact to circuits, substations and transmission lines in the area.

If the outage was caused by a large circuit, Stothert said, OPPD “could restore power to 1,000 or more people. If it’s a line down in somebody’s backyard because of a tree falling down ... it could be two or three houses. So that’s when it goes much slower, when they’ve got to get into these individual backyards for power lines down.”

Further complicating matters, if the mast that connects a power line to the house is broken, that’s the homeowner’s responsibility and will need to be repaired by an electrician to get the lights back on. OPPD is responsible and will repair the power line from an intact connection on a house to the power pole.

While much of the power loss was caused by downed trees that took down power lines, the storm was powerful enough to take down poles and knock out other electrical equipment.

“There’s a lot of tangled power lines, some broken utility poles and damaged transmission equipment and substation equipment,” Baker said. “A lot of factors contributed. Those winds were something.”

City at work on streets, traffic signals

The City of Omaha had 30 maintenance crews working Thursday to clear trees and limbs from city streets. By midday Thursday, some streets remained impassable.

“We want to make sure the roadways are safe, make sure they’re all passable, so we’ve been working at all hours to make sure that happens,” said Assistant Public Works Director Austin Rowser.

The city was also working to restore traffic signals knocked out of service, with city officials urging caution at intersections where signals are dark or flashing.

It also offered five tree debris drop-off sites, which will open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily until further notice. The locations are Hefflinger Park, 112th Street and West Maple Road; Towl Park, 93rd Street and West Center Road; Levi Carter Park, 4405 Carter Lake Shore Drive; the 156th and F Streets football field; and Greenbrier Park, 20601 Park Road in the Elkhorn area.

If people have downed limbs they can’t take to a drop-off site, city officials said, they can put them by their curbs. The city expects to begin curbside debris pickup as soon as Monday. It will help the crews go faster if the limbs are cut up.

“So there’s some time there for people to get those out to the curb and make sure they’re available for our crews to start picking up,” Rowser said.

Jo Rasmussen, who lives near 50th and Davenport Streets, said she didn’t even hear the huge tree branch that came down in her yard as she hunkered down Wednesday “hoping my house didn’t blow away.”

But in a scene that was repeated all across the metro, several neighbors arrived just after to help. It took a chain and a pickup truck to pull the branch away from the tree and clear Rasmussen’s driveway.

“A lot of teamwork. And then an awesome block party afterward,” Rasmussen said. “We find out what a great neighborhood we have when we have these kinds of things.”

World-Herald staff writers Marjie Ducey and Dan Crisler contributed to this report.