Condos & Homes Flooded By Busted Pipes, After Mass Power Outage At Lake Of The Ozarks [VIDEO + PHOTOS]

As temperatures plummeted at Lake of the Ozarks on Thursday, Dec. 22 and Friday, Dec. 23, suddenly the lights went off for thousands of homes and businesses in Osage Beach.

But more significantly: the heat went off.

Temperatures dove into the negatives on Thursday night and wouldn't rise above freezing until Sunday night — and then only momentarily. Meanwhile, Osage Beach residents shivered or sought refuge, as Ameren linemen scrambled to restore power.

Lake Regional Hospital — the only hospital at the Lake — reported they had intermittent power issues throughout Thursday night and into Friday. The hospital postponed all elective surgeries on Friday, to be safe. But the hospital was equipped with generators and so was able to keep patients safe and warm.

At NHC Osage Beach, a senior-care and rehab center on Passover Rd., Administrator Chandler Todd says the center lost power late Thursday night, and it was out for about 10 hours. Power was restored at around 9 a.m. on Friday, Todd said, noting, "It was a long night."

Some residents report having gone without power for nearly a full day. Approximately 4,100 homes and businesses were without power at some point during the mass outage, Ameren told Lake Expo.

And during that time, for many, the pipes froze.

At The Ledges condominiums, off Nichols Rd., the frozen pipes burst, pouring water through dozens of condos in multiple buildings.

Video sent to Lake Expo shows water raining down into one condo unit, from damaged pipes above. Outside, ice formed on the HVAC unit and front entry. The video is below:

Ameren stated that more then a thousand customers had their power restored by 2 a.m. the next day and a majority restored by mid-morning. Because of the high demand on the system, power had to be restored incrementally to avoid overloading the circuits.

Chip Webb, division director of Central Missouri Division, explained the outage was due to equipment failure. Specifically: an insulator failed in a sub transmission circuit, which disrupted circuits feeding the substation. That reduced transmission capacity and overloaded the substation.

"We continued to have other challenges with all the 34 systems on our sub transmission system. If we got one thing fixed, then we'd have a problem somewhere else. And again, it was tied to the just the extreme load that the system was was experiencing," Webb explained.

It's unknown how much damage was caused by the frozen pipes resulting from the mass power outage. Kristin Reed, owner of A-Z Home Services, a disaster-cleanup/restoration service at Lake of the Ozarks, said her staff worked all through Christmas weekend, providing emergency remediation as the calls kept pouring in.

Ameren told Lake Expo changes were in the works for a more robust power grid at Lake of the Ozarks, including a new substation in the area.

"We're always looking for the opportunities where we have challenges and making sure that we're addressing those challenges as quickly as we can," Webb said.