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    The air up there
February 8, 2010

Marlow back to full power

Plenty of work still to be done

Ron Booth

MARLOW — After a knockout punch from Mother Nature, the City of Marlow is back in the ring. More precisely, the town was off of generators and running from its own electric substation after an ice storm knocked out power Jan. 28.

“We are up and running from our own substation,” City Administrator Janice Cain said. “We are off generators. People can operate as normal. We got off of generators at about 10 a.m. (Monday) morning. As a side note, those generators use 200 gallons of fuel an hour.”

Cain said that some citizens are still without power because their meters were knocked loose from their homes during the storm.

“We still have some individual meter connects that need to be done,” she said. “I don’t know how many, but I would guess that it is 300-plus.

“We went through and fixed our major issues, and we did some temporary fixes so that we could get power back on that we’ll have to go back and do permanent fixes on.”

Marlow Public Schools were back in session today as normal.

Cain said that there were still many crews in Marlow working on powerline issues, and that if those crews hadn’t come in that there might not be power in Marlow now.

“We work under a mutual-aid agreement,” Cain said, “and there is a cost to the city for those crews coming in and working.

“We did a lot of pre-work so that the people that are able to have power now would be able to have power once we got up and running.”

Cain said that the City of Marlow will be working with Oklahoma Municipal Power Association to identify other options that the city can invest in to help prevent future prolonged outages.

The assessment of the total damage done by the storm is still ongoing, but should be done soon.

“We should have a total damage assessment done in a couple of weeks,” Cain said.

Cain said that a full assessment would include lost revenue to the city.

“People seem to think that this didn’t have an affect on the city, but we are 10 days with out electric revenue,” Cain said. “With the exception of a couple of businesses, we were without sales tax revenue.”

Although FEMA has not declared Stephens County or any of its cities as disaster areas, Cain said that the city’s damage assessment will be done as if the area would be declared a disaster.

“We are operating as if everything we do is federal assistance, as far as documenting everything so if the opportunity arises we will be eligible for federal assistance,” Cain said.

— Ron Booth is the managing editor for The Duncan Banner. He can be reached at 580-255-5354, Ext. 166, or via e-mail at ron.booth@duncanbanner.com.

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