By Thursday evening, Evergy crews had restored power to more than 90% of customers impacted by extreme winds on Wednesday. Evergy crews were joined by more than 250 personnel from regional neighboring utilities to help restore power to Evergy customers in Kansas and Missouri.
Wednesday’s windstorm brought sustained high winds to the entirety of Evergy’s service area, with gusts up to 100 mph in some locations. Strong winds brought down power lines, broke poles and caused other damage to the power grid, interrupting service to 258,000 Evergy customers. Evergy crews made steady progress restoring power, and 62 percent of impacted customers were back on by Thursday morning. By about 8 p.m. Thursday, outage numbers had been reduced to about 20,000 customers. Evergy expects power to be restored to nearly all affected customers by Friday evening, but some outages will extend into the weekend.
Chuck Caisley talked about some challenges that made power restoration challenging in a Thursday afternoon news conference. Much of the initial damage assessment and restoration work was at night, and damage from the storm was spread across the Evergy service area. In many areas, the nature of the damage meant that each repair restores power to a small number of customers.