UPDATE:
Liberty Utilities Central: Power has been restored to all customers in Willard.
Thank you to our crews for the safe restoration!
A special shout out to the lineman contractors who are helping to build a second Willard substation and who stepped in today to assist with restoration!
The new substation should be completed by the end of the year and will help with fewer outages and faster restoration times in the future.
Originally reported at 6 p.m.
Liberty Utilities says about half of its customers in Willard have had power restored, and the rest should have it on by 6:30 p.m.
Spokeswoman Kelly Price says about 1,800 customers were still without power around 5 p.m.
Police say it could be at least 6 p.m. before power is restored to parts of Willard.
A crash near Highway AB and Highway 160 knocked out power around 11 a.m.
Police say the crash took out a power pole.
It will take a large crane truck to remove the vehicle so utility crews can go to work restoring power.
Utility crews will have to replace the pole and some transformers before power can be completely restored.
MoDOT has been working on getting generators up at intersections on Highway 160 to keep the traffic lights working.
Liberty Utilities – Empire District showed nearly 3,200 customers were without power around 1:30 p.m.
Police say there were some people trapped for a short time in an elevator in the Willard School District.
The outage did affect some schools on the North side of the district.
Class let out as usual today.
Please note that despite the power outage, all of our buildings will release on their normal MONDAY SCHEDULE. Grades 7-12 were safely released at 2:00PM and our K-6 friends will be released as usual at approx. 3:00PM! Thank you for your patience today! #WeAreWillard
— Willard Schools (@willardschools) April 8, 2019
Original Story:
A crash south of Highway AB and Highway 160 has knocked out power to part of Willard.
Go Patrol spotters say police are directing traffic around the crash.
Traffic lights are out through town along Highway 160.
No word yet on when power will be restored.
