Frustrations run deep for some Evergy customers after days without power

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - Two days after severe weather slammed the metro and caused widespread power outages, many folks are still without power.

Forty-one hours into restoration efforts Evergy and out-of-state utility crews geared up and rolled out to continue restoring power to tens of thousands of customers.

“We have 1,000 crews ranging from Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and southern Missouri,” said Chuck Caisley, Evergy’s Chief Customer Officer.

Due to the magnitude and how widespread the storm was, the restoration process has been taking longer.

“There are about 27 hundred different areas of the system that are broken which means that were down to restoring outages that are down to 1, 2, 5, 10 customers so the going gets a little bit slower today,” Caisley said.

The amount of damage has also been a challenge, around 500 power poles were snapped or damaged during Friday’s storm.

“Each one of those poles takes between 2-6 hours to replace so just that in it itself is a massive undertaking,” explained Caisley.

However, as of Sunday morning 30,000 residents still find themselves anxiously waiting for their power to turn back on with no indication of when it will be restored.

“The lack of communication from Evergy has been incredibly frustrating, we don’t have an ETA, we haven’t seen any crews out here, we can see a tree sitting on power lines behind us,” Dan Cohen said.

Cohen’s frustrations are felt by many residents in their Waldo community.

“There are people who are on life-saving medication who need electricity and they can’t get answers either,” said Cohen.

“We have older folks that live on the block, I saw a family with young kids that packed up their car and are leaving, this block is usually filled with cars, and as you can see everyone has left,” Cohen said.

Like many others, they’ve been juggling where they’re going to stay, eat and charge their devices, for 36 hours now – and they simply just want an answer.

“We just want to know when our lights are going to be back on. Something must change in the future because for one storm to do this much damage, is pretty shocking,” said Cohen.

Evergy said they foresee restoration efforts continuing into Monday and possibly into Tuesday.

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READ MORE: Evergy: 87% have power restored with crews working around the clock for thousands still without