Since the '97 flood the City has received additional funds from the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to buy 16 additional flood-prone homes in several locations, including some in the River Oaks Subdivision that did not participate in 1994. Many of the Cooperative's lines are old with small conductors that are susceptible to breaking during ice storms and high winds. The line serves as a back-up source of power to an additional 600 consumers. Several consumers rely on electrical service to deal with their medical conditions. There are also numerous livestock confinement operations that rely on electrical service for ventilation, watering, and feed movement.
Extended outages pose the potential of significant losses in production and animals.
Since the rebuilding of this particular line there have been no outages due to ice storms or high winds. To date it has weathered the test of storms. The line serves 207 residential and 11 commercial customers, in addition to providing power to a communications tower housing radio transmitters for two rural electric cooperatives and a TV transmitter. Outages were occurring 7 times a year on average, lasting from 2 to 24 hours. On 3 occasions, dangling live wires caused fires that had to be quickly suppressed to prevent larger burns in this heavily forested, scenic area.