Crews continue to work 24/7 to restore service in metro Louisville and other scattered areas after last week's devastating ice storm. According to the Courier-Journal this morning, 56,000 LG&E and 82,000 Kentucky Utilities customers still are awaiting the restoration of their power. Those KU customers appear to be primarily in the more rural areas as we have restored service to the vast majority of our Lexington customers. Meanwhile, over in Evansville, the Courier & Press reports that Vectren still has 20,000 customers without power.
I get a very interesting update very 2 hours that describes our progress. It focuses on cable modems because, even when not in use, those devices remain online and we can tell how many are missing. It gives us a good sense about how many of our customers are still being impacted with a loss of service. Most of the missing modems are located in homes that are still without power. As of 8:30 this morning, 10% of modems remain offline in Louisville, 5% in Evansville, and 3% in Lexington. Northern Kentucky, Columbus and Bowling Green are largely back to normal operations.
I have received a couple of emails from customers who are very frustrated because we are unable to provide the level of service they expect and we desire. I hope they will accept my apology. Over the weekend, our call centers remained clogged with people trying to contact us. Most customers with non-critical issues were totally understanding when we asked them to contact us again sometime this week, during regular business hours, for their non-critical service issues. We really hate to inconvenience customers but in a crisis like this, we have to try to keep lines open for people with total service outages so we can identify cable-related outages after power is restored and get back to normal as quickly as possible. A special thanks to our customers for understanding!
The warmer temperatures over the weekend helped to melt most of the ice that, for days, had continued to weigh down tree limbs and utility lines. Colder weather starting tomorrow won't help but, unless another ice event surprises us (the forecast is for light snow), we should continue to make good progress to get virtually everyone back online this week.
A special thanks again to Roger for sharing some more of his photos like the one on this page.
And thanks again to all of our dedicated employees and understanding customers as we work very hard to get back to normal operations.
We'll keep you posted.
Mr.Willner,
Thanks for the re-assuring posts. I don't expect that with 150,000 customers still without basic electricity that the luxury of Internet and TV are that important to the ones affected. For the rest of the whiners ... Grow up and read a book !!!
Posted by: Cliff | Tuesday, February 03, 2009 at 04:37 PM