An ice storm that began Tuesday night continued pelting the city Wednesday, causing power lines to fall steadily throughout the day and forcing cancellation of classes today in Lawrence and area school districts.

About 400 customers were still without power in the Lawrence area Wednesday night, down from 2,000 the night before. The power company’s goal was to restore all power in the area by this evening.

“The thing that could make that not come through for us if we had additional icing or, even worse, if we had high winds,” said Jim Ludwig, Westar spokesman.

Cold and frustrated

Lawrence resident DiAnne Damro said she was getting nothing but busy signals Wednesday as she called a Westar customer-service line and a toll-free, automated-reporting line. Power had been out since 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at her home on Steven Drive in western Lawrence.

“We’d just like to get an answer,” she said.

Damro was trying to decide whether she and a friend should get a motel room and find out whether she could take her two dachshunds with her.

Westar spokeswoman Gina Penzig recommended that customers use the company’s automated line, (800) LIGHT-KS, to report outages, but she said the system could only handle 30,000 calls per hour. If the lines are busy, she said, customers should just keep trying.

Kansas University English professor Paul Lim lost power about 10 p.m. Tuesday at his home near 15th Street and Kasold Drive. As of 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, he’d reported the outage three times on the automated line but was wondering whether his messages were getting through.

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“They may be working on it. I just haven’t seen any activity,” he said. “I’ll just hang in here and hope for the best.”

Bigger picture

But Lawrence’s power problems were small compared with other parts of the state.

As of Wednesday evening, there were about 88,000 customers statewide without power — more than 50,000 of them in Wichita, Penzig said. Some people in the central part of the state will be without power seven to 10 days, she said.

Roughly 1,150 Westar employees were working statewide on the storm damage Wednesday night; 28 of them were in Lawrence. Ludwig said crews would work through the night.

Callers reported more than 60 downed or sparking power lines throughout the city between Tuesday night and Wednesday night. Outages were scattered across Lawrence, but many were in older parts of the city.

Schools closed

Lawrence public schools closed again today — the second day in a row since classes restarted Monday after winter break. The Lawrence Virtual School schedule was unaffected. Most other area public and some private schools also closed, including Eudora, Ottawa, Perry-Lecompton, Tonganoxie, McLouth and Oskaloosa.

Kansas University students are still on their winter break, but all nonemergency employees were allowed Wednesday to leave work up to one hour before the end of their workday and may arrive up to one hour later than their normal schedules today. KU emergency workers were expected to work their normal schedules.

KU employees were encouraged to check the university inclement weather line, 864-SNOW, and the KU Web site at www.ku.edu to see whether there are schedule changes because of the weather.

Help from neighbors

Dixie Vitt, 76, had a pleasant surprise Wednesday afternoon when Lawrence High School junior Mike Williams, the grandson of a neighbor, and friend Scott Helm volunteered to help cut up a tree limb that had fallen across her driveway in the 1000 block of West 22nd Terrace.

“These two young men showed up,” she said. “It’s nice to see some nice ones instead of all ornery ones.”

The Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vt., closed for the day because of a power outage, and the Post Office, 645 Vt., lost power for about two hours Wednesday morning.

Despite the ice, there weren’t major problems with mail delivery, Postmaster Judy Raney said, but phone service was out all day, making communication with carriers difficult.

“Everybody is handling it pretty well,” she said. “We’re out delivering our mail everywhere we can.”

Letter carriers were not delivering to a home if they would be required to walk up icy, untreated steps to get to a mailbox, Raney said.

Roads OK

The number of vehicle crashes around the city didn’t jump during the storm, with just 11 noninjury accidents and two injury accidents reported between 5 p.m. Tuesday and late Wednesday night. Neither of the injury wrecks were life-threatening.

“Obviously, people heeded the warnings and did pretty well,” said Sgt. Dan Ward, a Lawrence Police Department spokesman.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office worked just two traffic accidents Wednesday, neither involving serious injuries, said Maj. Ken McGovern. Another noninjury accident was investigated later in the day. Dispatchers for the Kansas Turnpike Authority and Kansas Highway Patrol reported some minor fender-benders and slide-offs but no major injuries.

“I don’t think it’s as bad as it could be,” said Mark Bradford, deputy chief of Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical.

Bradford said Fire & Medical had 50 percent more firefighters than usual on duty overnight Tuesday to handle the storm. He predicted that if ice and sleet tapered off, the agency would be back to its usual staffing levels by this morning.

Patrick Knorr, general manager of Sunflower Broadband, said the company assigned about six employees to work through the night Tuesday. The company used about 10 backup generators at a time Tuesday night throughout the city to keep customers from losing service.

Warm-up ahead

The snow, sleet and freezing rain is over, but today will remain cold, 6News meteorologist Matt Sayers said. Lawrence residents will wake up to temperatures in the single digits and see a high today of only about 17 degrees. Friday’s high will be 27 degrees before it finally warms up to Saturday’s high of 39 and Sunday’s high in the 50s.