(Radio Iowa) – MidAmerican energy spokesman Geoff Greenwood says as of early afternoon more than 23-thousand MidAmerican customers are without power due to the storm. “We’re really getting hit hard by Mother Nature this time around,” he says. It is the second blizzard they’ve had to deal with this month, and he says the snow isn’t the biggest problem.

“Really, the biggest system impact that we’re seeing is due to extremely high sustained winds and wind gusts. Those winds are just pummeling our overhead lines there,” he says. “they’re taking down trees. Tree debris is taking down overhead lines, and then with all the snow that we’re getting, it’s hard, if not impossible, for our crews to get to where they need to go in some instances.”

Greenwood says the most damage so far has been in northwest Iowa. “They’re seeing is they’re seeing a very large number of lines down, trees on lines. We’re seeing poles down, and I mean a fairly large number throughout the northwestern part of our service area. So this is a sizable impact that we’re experiencing,” Greenwood says. He says the number of people without power has been constantly changing as the storm moves through and they react to the damage.

“In some cases we are able to reroute the circuit to restore customers, but in other cases, it is going to take a broken pole out, replace that pole, and then all the equipment up on top, and that’s going to take some time,” he says. There has been less snow as the storm moved to the east, but Greenwood says ice has been an issue in other areas.

“When ice builds up on an overhead line, it changes the air flow on that line, the line starts to bounce. And once it bounces violently, it can snap, it can break components, and it can take down poles. And we’ve seen some situations where it’s a cascading effect, and it’s pole after pole after pole that’s been taken down. Greenwood says they had enough warning for this storm to get crews in place.

“We were concerned enough to send extra crews into western and northwestern Iowa to stage them. In other words, we put them in a location, and they waited for the storm to come to them, and that’s because we were concerned about the ability for them to travel,” Greenwod says.

Greenwood says those concerns about travel proved to come true as the closed roads have caused problems with crews getting in to fix downed poles and power lines.