When A July 4th Storm Plunged Missouri Into Darkness, Hundreds Of Linemen Put On Their Boots

It was July 4th. Jason Haynam had an unopened drink in his hand when his phone buzzed. A storm was ripping across Missouri, knocking out power to thousands of homes and businesses.

"I looked at my wife and said, 'Honey, I love you. But I'm heading in,'" Haynam said.

The storm was devastating. Rain fell in torrents. Violent winds — reportedly over 100 mph in the Jefferson City area — tore trees from the soil and sent unsecured items flying. And though it ended in less than an hour, the summer thunderstorm left mayhem behind. The damage triangle ran roughly from Smithton to Gerald to the Lake area, with the worst of it near Osage City.

In Ameren's Central Division alone, roughly 32,000 customers lost power, largely due to snapped utility poles from downed trees. Ameren would eventually replace 78 broken poles, along with 12 massive (80-foot) transmission poles destroyed in one Jefferson City corridor.

At Harbor Freight in Osage Beach — one of the only Lake of the Ozarks retailers reporting in-stock generators online — customers lined up outside the door on Sunday morning, July 5. But demand far outweighed supply. This would not be a short-lived outage either: some residents would go without electricity for more than 60 hours.

As soon as he got that July 4th alert, Haynam, Ameren's Central Division Director, began to mobilize. Hundreds of Ameren linemen were deployed, with hundreds more bringing mutual aid from outside the area. Vegetation workers were sent to clear the way, removing downed trees, while damage assessment teams helped determine what needed attention, and where to start.

At the peak of the response, about 1,600 personnel worked to restore power to Missourians amid a steamy July 4th weekend.

Coordinators worked behind the scenes, managing resources and directing restoration teams — even doing things like making hotel reservations for linemen: a tall order on a holiday weekend.

And in the forests and fields: the linemen.

Haynam calls them "part billy goat." Some of the toughest terrain is in the Lake of the Ozarks area, he said, where linemen scramble over hills, across creeks, and through dense underbrush to get Missourians powered back up.

For those coordinators behind the scenes and the linemen sweating out in the Ozark jungle, Haynam said the work is deeply personal, and they take pride in it. "These guys are customers too," he pointed out. "This is their community."

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In the wake of the storm, some residents wondered why the restoration took so long or why some areas seemed to regain power quickly while others took days longer. Haynam explained: crews first restore the main corridors of the grid — what he calls the "backbone." Only after those major lines are energized can they work outward into subdivisions, coves and homes tucked into the Ozark hills. "You can't heat up the guy at the end of the line if you don't have everything to him ready," he added.

While the July 4th storm wrecked Ameren's power grid temporarily, Haynam said the company is using the opportunity to rebuild it stronger. Storms like this reveal underlying vulnerabilities, he said. So they're replacing older, smaller utility poles with larger ones. They're also rebuilding the system differently. Every several poles, crews install a more resilient fiberglass pole, which helps resist cascading failures where one snapped wooden pole could otherwise create a domino effect.

Haynam says the men and women whose job is to restore power know that the longer residents are down, the more they suffer — from not only uncomfortable temperatures but even lack of water (for those on a well) and loss of valuable food in fridges and freezers.

Eventually, though, even heroes have to sleep.

More than once, however, Haynam said crews have radioed in after being told to quit for the night. "Give me another hour," they'll say. "I can get a couple hundred more people back on."