ROCHELLE — A strong storm with high winds left hundreds of people without power in Rochelle early Saturday, after it snapped more than a dozen power poles late Friday night. Three poles were knocked down near Pilot, with restoration expected to take one to two days.
Blake Toliver, Superintendent of Electric Operations and Generations with Rochelle Municipal Utilities, said that it may take some time to get the lights back on.
“So it’s 14 poles just on that feed to the west side of town. We have three poles down right in front of our Ritchie Road substation. There’s several poles at Pilot,” he said.
“There’s a pole broken on Creston Road. Those straight line winds that came through last night did a number on our system. So we have a lot of things just kind of hanging on by a thread right now.”
Flagg Road from Queens Road to the Rolling Green Estates driveway is currently closed. Restoration efforts are underway, with hopes to restore most of the area later today, although some homes on Queens Road may remain without power for more than a day. Additional damage includes one pole down on Creston Road, although power has been restored there, and three poles down on Ritchie Road, which caused no outages.
Toliver cautioned that it may take a day to restore power to some locations, and we may not be out of the woods yet.
“So if we get these winds that they’re talking about today, don’t be surprised if we have some more outages just due to stuff that broke loose from last night,” he said.
Crews have been working overnight and are awaiting support from nearby communities to assist with repairs.
