Power restoration will continue into Thursday for some across the St. Louis area

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) - Ameren Missouri had hoped to restore power by the end of the night Wednesday but several thousand remain in the dark after days with out power.

“Thanks to the help of additional crews from neighboring states, a team of more 1,800 today has been engaged. Every storm is different, but this one’s been challenging for our team due to extensive tree and infrastructure damage,” Ameren’s Tommie Bugett.

By the end of Wednesday, Ameren Missouri still had around 4,000 people without power. But they restore almost 10,000 during the day. The prioritize critial infrastructure and then work their way through the outages, focusing on the larger jobs that will restore the most people. Outages span from South, West and North St. Louis County.

Many have asked what can be done to ensure this kind of emergency disaster doesn’t happened again.

“We’ve been working on a smart energy plan and that consists of replacing our traditional wood poles with composite poles. They’re much stronger and hold up better in high winds,” said Bugett. But in an emergency restoration situation like this, wood ones will still be used as their cheaper and more readily available.

News4 asked about efforts to bury lines underground to protect them from Mother Nature.

“That is part of the smart energy plan also to place lines under gorund instead of overhead, some circusmtances we cannot, but that is in the future.”

Ameren says if you remain without power, make sure you to get in touch with Ameren to ensure your home outage is known and reported so they can get a crew out as quickly as possible.

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