Nebraska public power districts – actually rural electric cooperatives like Buckeye REC – sustained terrible damage to lines and poles in a January ice storm followed by 60 mph winds. It was one of a series of winter storms that blasted the Midwest and Plains states, including parts of Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas.

Ice coated trees, wires, distribution poles, and transmission structures 3-6 inches deep in places. Thousands of electric consumers were without power, and the damage to electric systems was estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

BREC members and employees can sympathize, based on the 2003 President’s Day ice storm that paralyzed our area and severely damaged our system. In a matter of months, we expect to finish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster repair and restoration project that enabled us to recover from the catastrophic ice storm.

The Nebraska power districts will also be able to access FEMA funds (75 percent on the dollar for eligible work). President Bush issued a disaster declaration, opening the door for damaged systems to begin planning recovery projects.

The scope of damage is much worse, however, than what we sustained in 2003. Reports stated that over 130 miles of high-voltage transmission lines were “on the ground” and a total of 600 miles of transmission were “out of service” in the wake of the storms. Transmission structures buckled and broke under the weight of the ice.

At the local level, power districts struggled with widespread distribution outages. One district, serving around 25,000 electric customers, projected initial damage at $80 million. Compare this to BREC after the 2003 ice storm, when we had around $20 million in actual damage. Our losses were one-twentieth of what that Nebraska power district suffered.

The overall cost of damage to electric systems during the January, 2007, ice storms and blizzards in the central U.S. will be much higher than anything we have seen to date, except for the Gulf Coast hurricanes in 2005. The large footprint of the storms combined with higher prices for poles, conductors, transformers, and labor (all holdover effects associated with the hurricanes) will present a new challenge for the federal disaster agency FEMA.

I’ve heard some critics of federal aid for public power entities complain that tax dollars should not be used for such purposes. How else would you justify the expenditure of funds for recovery? Public power districts and electric co-ops serve millions of consumers but don’t operate like giant investor-owned utilities, which distribute profits to stockholders through dividend payments. When disaster strikes, we don’t have huge reserves of capital on which to fall back. Without federal help, BREC members would have had to bear the entire cost of ice storm damage repair through their electric rates.

When disaster damage totals a large percentage of -- or exceeds -- your electric system’s net worth, only federal intervention and understanding lenders, such as the Rural Utilities Service, Cooperative Finance Corporation, and Co-Bank, can help public power districts and electric co-ops get on the road to recovery.

Restoring electric service is first and foremost on everyone’s minds after a natural disaster, but it takes years and millions of dollars to make things right. Here at BREC, we had expected the FEMA project to conclude in 2006, but we kept finding ice storm damage. The disaster we experienced four years ago was much worse and more widespread than anyone suspected.

Although FEMA has been much maligned for shortcomings and failures associated with its 2005 hurricane response, I can’t imagine what we would have done or where we could have turned without the agency.