CU customers without power down to 20,000

Peak outage for the utility was 75,000 customers.

The utility warns, however, that future progress on power restoration will be slow going as crews move to work on smaller clusters of customers and individual homes and businesses.

The weather will also be a continued factor; trees rebounding as ice begins to thaw could cause additional power line damage.

But CU crews now face the possibility of an additional weather-related challenge: snow.

The National Weather Service Springfield office is predicting that southwest Missouri could be in line for 4 inches to 6 inches of snow this weekend.

CU General Manager John Twitty, speaking at a Wednesday afternoon press conference at the Greene County Emergency Management offices, said that if a significant amount of ice doesn’t melt before the snow arrives, the situation could be compounded.

“I don’t think there’s any question that there would be more outages, and that some people who have been restored could see additional outages,” Twitty said.