Hope Water and Light cautioned people against going near downed power lines like these on Dodds Street in Hope.

UPDATE at 8:30 a.m. 2/2/2023: HWL crews continue to work to restore power outages caused by the ice storm. At 5:30 a.m we had the outage number down to 265 but rain continues and temperatures are still below freezing.

We are losing more trees and limbs in our service territory causing more outages to occur. Currently, we have 1,019 customers out. Our crews are now working south and east of town on the circuits that will allow us to restore the highest numbers of customers. We are getting a lot of calls about trees and limbs down and electric meters pulled away from homes. We are working to divert some resources to these locations to aid in clearing these calls.

If you have damage to your electric meter base, you will need to contact an electrician and schedule repairs. The most efficient way you can contact our office to report problems is using the SmartHub App, if you have it installed. It is fast and efficient.

As always stay away from downed lines. Thank you for your patience!

The following comes from an earlier report:

Hope Water & Light has experienced large scale outages from the ice storm throughout the night. We have recorded approximately 4,000 outages so far. HWL crews have been actively working these outages all night, and we currently have approximately 1,300 customers still out of power. The areas being worked at this time are Hwy 278E, Hwy 32E, Hwy 73E, Hempstead 56, and South Edgewood.

We anticipate having the remaining outages restored approximately 8:00 AM. Thank you for your patience and for your safety stay away from any downed lines.