By Matt Sepic, KWMU
St. Louis – Officials at AmerenUE say they will have more people on the ground to gather outage information should a major storm strike again this year.
Ameren executives say the severe thunderstorms that pounded the St. Louis area last July were the worst they've ever seen in terms of damage to lines and equipment.
Some customers were in the dark for several days while crews fixed the problems.
AmerenUE Vice President for Missouri Energy Delivery Ron Zdeller says improving communication was a major lesson of last summer.
"I think the thing that we learned from this last storm, because of the magnitude of the storm, is that we just want to upgrade the numbers that we move into an area better than we did perhaps in the storm of last year," Zdeller said.
Zdeller says Ameren now has three times as many people trained to go out and pinpoint outages than it did last summer.
He says in many cases, an automatic monitoring system will let technicians know about power cuts in a specific area before customers call.