Customers without Service Asked to Call PEORIA, Ill., June 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite the repeated waves of severe weather on Thursday and Friday, 1,400 Ameren Illinois Utilities (AmerenCIPS, AmerenCILCO, AmerenIP) field personnel and allied contractors will have the lights back on by tonight for nearly all customers who had lost power due to those storms. Customers who are still without power are asked to call the Ameren Illinois Utilities (AIU): 1-888-672-5252 (AmerenCILCO), 1-888-789-2477 (AmerenCIPS) and 1-800-755-7000 (AmerenIP). Customers may call these numbers with other questions or to report downed wires. At 4:30 p.m. today, the Ameren Illinois Utilities (AIU) report that less than 2,600 customers are without power, primarily in Adams, Bureau, Champaign, Henderson, Knox, Peoria, St. Clair and Vermilion counties. Any additional severe weather could hamper service restoration work and cause new outages. The latest information on the electrical service restoration effort as well as safety advice and weather reports is available at IllinoisOutage.com. The first round of storms swept across Central Illinois Thursday morning, causing service outages for 43,500. Those outages were reduced to less than 7,000 Friday afternoon when additional storms hit Central and Southern Illinois, which sent the outage numbers back up to 40,000 customers. Since last night, AIU and allied contractor crews brought service back to about 37,400 customers. Since the service restoration work began, the AIU Emergency Operations Center (EOC) has deployed Storm Trailers in Peoria County and Quincy. The Storm Trailers are mobile storerooms, stocked with the material field crews need to get the lights back on. The trailers can be moved to central staging sites to provide essential materials in those areas with the greatest damage. Field personnel have installed about 200 utility poles replaced thousands of feet of damaged electrical wires and repaired or replaced other equipment. Homeowners and others who need to repair customer-owned facilities, such as the meter base, weatherhead or point of attachment, should have this work performed by a professional electrical contractor. These repairs must be completed before service can be safely restored. More information is available at IllinoisOutage.com. Residents also are reminded that safety must be the first priority when using portable generators. Never operate a portable generator indoors. Before using a portable generator, first open the main breaker or remove the main fuses before connecting the generator to your electrical system. The Ameren Illinois Utilities (AmerenCIPS, AmerenCILCO, AmerenIP) have been providing safe, reliable energy delivery service for more than a century. The Ameren Illinois Utilities deliver energy to 1.2 million electric and 840,000 natural gas customers in more than 1,200 communities within a 43,700-square-mile service territory. DATASOURCE: Ameren Illinois Utilities CONTACT: Ameren Illinois Utilities, +1-217-424-6400 Web Site: http://www.ameren.com/

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