Power Company Taken To Task Over Outage

Missouri and Illinois officials are calling on an electric utility to explain why thousands of customers remained without power a week after a harsh winter storm and offer solutions to prevent another extended mass outage.

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt on Thursday asked his state's Public Service Commission to hold public hearings and for St. Louis-based Ameren Corp. to provide a "clear" plan for preventing a recurrence.

"People that are paying the utility bill deserve to have the consistent delivery of services," Blunt said at a news conference in Jefferson City. "That's not happening with Ameren today."

Heading into Friday, some 19,000 Ameren customers still were without power, all but about 1,000 of them in Illinois, spokesman Tim Fox said. At the peak, more than 500,000 Ameren customers in both states were without power.

Illinois Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn also pressed utility regulators to investigate, calling the lingering power disruptions a "systemic failure" despite the efforts of thousands of repair workers from 14 states.

"It's not a big surprise that Illinois and Missouri have snow and ice in the winter," Quinn said Thursday during a news conference at a senior citizen's center in East St. Louis, Ill. "We need to ask the question why Ameren has had such great difficulty making sure the system is reliable."

On Wednesday, the Illinois Commerce Commission said it would review plans for an investigation into Ameren's preparedness and response to the storm at its public meetings Dec. 19-20.

Blunt said two massive outages in the St. Louis area in recent months compelled him to declare a state of emergency and activate Missouri's National Guard. He suggested regulators delay Ameren's pending requests for rate increases until the utility details "how they plan to avoid what is becoming an expensive, inconvenient and dangerous trend."

Quinn proposed that any Ameren shortcomings pinpointed by investigators draw fines for the company's top executives.

Ameren said it welcomed the scrutiny.

"We believe we've thrown every possible resource into this," Ameren spokeswoman Susan Gallagher said. She noted that repair crews trying to fix the latest outages had installed 391 miles of wire as of Thursday morning — more than Ameren normally uses in six months.

"Given all the storms, all the factors, there's no question there are areas for improvement," Gallagher said.

But this isn't the first time it's taken Ameren this long to get power restored. In July, strong winds and heavy rain knocked power out to thousands. Then, it took the company much more than a week to get everyone's lights back on.

The storm that plowed through the Midwest last week dropped snow, in some cases more than a foot, and coated the region with ice before carrying the wind and thunderstorms into the Northeast.

At least 19 deaths in Illinois and Missouri have been blamed on the storm or the frigid temperatures that have followed.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich this week declared 49 counties state disaster areas and on Thursday was joined by members of the state's congressional delegation in asking President Bush to declare them federal disaster areas. Blunt also hopes for a presidential disaster declaration based on damage reported in all 114 counties.