North Arkansas Electric Cooperative CEO Mel Coleman spoke with KTLO, Classic Hits and The Boot News and said they expect some outages due to the forecast changes overnight, but not a system-wide outage.

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TRANSCRIPT

Well, you know, when the weather forecast changed for the night, I got a little more worried. You know, I still want to emphasize that this is not an ice storm where we’re expecting bad things to happen for several days and, you know, 5 degrees after that. I believe this is a typical heavy wet snow, at least that’s what they say. When we were talking earlier they said we were getting 2 to 4 inches and overnight that turned into 6 to 8 inches and you know some people even said it was about 8 inches in some places. So what will this mean for us? This will cause some problems for North Arkansas Electric. There will be problems throughout the system, but it’s not a system-wide failure, if you know what I mean. There is so much weight acting on a branch, especially a dead branch that falls. It will hit the lines. It’s going to finish them off and there’s going to be some failures so I’m just not being honest, we’re not panicking about it. It’s going to be, uh, I hate to say, a normal outage event because we don’t like outages at all, but it’s not going to be something like a big ice storm, but we’re going to see some outages. We are ready to answer. Talk to all of our assets and all of our people this morning. They exist. That’s why we also asked members to be prepared, don’t panic, just be prepared.

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