Ice accumulating on power lines in Sioux Falls Tuesday left thousands of people without power. It’s all part of the massive system dropping severe winter weather across South Dakota this spring.
At the peak of power outages Tuesday, 9,000 people in Sioux Falls were without electricity. That includes homes, businesses and schools.
By mid-morning, authorities received almost 200 different reports of power lines down. Crews work to restore electricity to people left in the dark, but they prepare for more power problems as ice collects on lines and fierce winds rage.
"What we did do is we brought in overtime crews for fire," Sioux Falls Fire Chief Jim Sideras says. "We split crews up for fire so that we could respond, because a lot of these calls are going to be medical calls and we do have a storm procedure that we follow to allow multiple calls to be going on at one time when we have a major incident like this."
City police and county authorities also have extra staff working the storm. Officials remind people who see downed power lines to stay away from the lines and anything the electricity could be touching. Live wires are the priority for crews, so they ask people call 911 to report the danger.
Power companies are telling customers they’re working on getting the lights back on, but some have been warned power may not be restored until Wednesday afternoon.