JACKSONVILLE, Ark. — On Wednesday morning, thousands of Arkansans woke up in the dark due to power outages in several counties.
Experts said the cold weather could have had something to do with those outages.
"We do a great job of maintaining the system, maintaining the right of way, and preparing. However, there are just things that we cannot see," said Tonya Sexton with First Electric Cooperative.
When you have below-freezing temperatures for multiple days in a row as we've seen, recently Sexton said it can take a toll on the equipment.
"This weather has caused some insulators to crack and fail conductors," Sexton explained.
She said crews make sure to check for cracks, but in cases like these, they're not always visible.
"First Electric maintains over 10,000 miles of line, you can imagine there's hundreds of thousands of insulators and conductors and electrical equipment that is attached to that," she explained.
Sexton said the outages started happening at around 11:00 p.m. on Monday night and continued through the morning hours on Wednesday.
First Electric and Entergy both reported thousands of outages on Wednesday morning and just before 7:00 a.m., more than 7,000 customers were without power.
At one point, First Electric even asked them to conserve power.
"We want the load to be as low as possible to make sure that we can get them back on," she added.
She said getting power back on for thousands isn't a fast process.
"We may do 100, 200, 300, we have to let that settle. We have to see if it's going to hold, and then we bring on another stage, and then we let that settle and hold to see if that's going to stay. And then we bring on more," she described.
Entergy has also felt the impact of the cold weather on its equipment.
"It does tend to, you know, get stressed occasionally because it is exposed to the elements. We've taken a lot of preventative measurements though, in order to reduce the amount of outages," said Matt Ramsey with Entergy.
Ramsey said that includes putting heaters on equipment to stop them from freezing.
"A lot of the preventative measurements that we've been taking all throughout the year, have definitely really shown up," he said.