FAIRMONT — The Fairmont Public Utilities Commission on Tuesday offered praise and gratitude to Marty Meixell, the city’s electric distribution superintendent, and his crew for their outstanding efforts in restoring power to the community following Thursday night’s storm.

“We lost the power plant immediately. It went off at 6:08 p.m.,” Meixell said. “I would say, at the peak, we had half of our customers out. By Friday morning, we had maybe 90 percent of the people back on.”

Calls to the electric department’s emergency number are routed directly to Meixell’s cell phone. He estimates he had about 200 calls the first night with the majority of the callers asking one question: How long is it going to take?

Meixell could not offer an answer. With seven linemen working through the night Thursday, and from sunup to sundown through the weekend, every effort was being made to restore power as quickly and safely as possible. However, he noted, pedestrian and motorist “gawkers” sometimes impeded the work.

When power was restored to an area, occasionally there were pockets of a few houses that still did not have power.

“We literally had to get out and walk the line,” he said.

Hardest hit was the area by the railroad tracks, Prairie Avenue and Dewey Street, but the northeast section of town maintained power with occasional “blinking.” A huge cottonwood tree near Hawkins Chevrolet went down, taking out four utility poles and a couple of transformers. The dealership was without power until Sunday night. This outage also impacted the Dairy Queen, which ended up closing for the season after losing all of its stock.

Meixell estimates there are still a handful of customers without power. In these instances, the service connection was torn out of the house and was too damaged to reconnect. Utility crews are trying to coordinate with local electricians to remedy the problem.

“By Sunday, people were getting a little irate, and I don’t blame them,” Meixell said. “For the most part, people were extremely appreciative and pretty understanding.”

He cautioned that the residual effects from the storm, such as cracked or hanging tree branches, might cause problems in the future. He also recommended revisiting and re-evaluating the department’s emergency response procedures.

“We don’t get a lot of storms like this, but when we get one, we better be ready for it,” he said. “It’s good to have an experienced crew. My guys worked their butts off. We can always do better, but overall I think we did pretty good.”

In other business, commissioners approved supplemental agreements with Verizon to install five small cell antennas to offload capacity from big cell towers due to increased demand for data usage. Verizon will pay $175 for annual rent per device and $876 annually for electric usage by each of the small cells.