Campbell said the chips are being sold to a charcoal plant in Burnside.
Meanwhile, Campbell said two ice storm-related projects funded by a Natural Resources Conservation Service grant have been completed. Debris was cleared from a creek along Scrubgrass Road and from the Chaplin River in the vicinity of Claunch Road.
The NRCS is offering grants to counties where storm debris had severely clogged rivers, streams and creeks. The grant for two projects in Boyle County totaled $50,000.
Campbell said he will apply for additional grant money to remove debris from sections of the Upper Salt River and waterways in the county. He has a list of five places along the river and other waterways where debris needs to be removed.
Inter-County Energy's fiscal court tour
Inter-County Energy's tour of the fiscal courts in its 12-county service area hit the Boyle court Tuesday. The reaction four Inter-County officials received from the Boyle magistrates was much more positive than the one it got at a recent meeting of Mercer County Fiscal Court.
At the Mercer meeting, magistrates were highly critical of Inter-County for the high bills many customers received for the billing cycle that included the prolonged outages caused by the storm, the difficult time customers had reporting outages and the pace of power restoration.
However, at the Boyle court meeting, Inter-County officials received only one question about billing and got several compliments for efforts to restore power under difficult conditions.
Inter-County was represented at the Boyle meeting by President and CEO Jim Jacobus, Vice President for Operations Marvin Graham, Vice President for Customer Services and Media Relations Sheree Gilliam, and Vice President of Finance and Accounting Vicki Lay.
"If you went out in the county like I did and saw all the broken poles and all the men working hard to restore power, you'd have to say you all did yoeman's work," said Magistrate Phil Sammons. "There was no reason for the complaining. We're spoiled."
Other magistrates agreed, and Judge-Executve Harold McKinney said he could not "take exception to what you all (magistrates) have said."
During the storm, all but eight of Inter-County's 19,000 customers in Boyle, Casey, Garrard, Lincoln and Mercer counties lost power. Graham said the storm was particularly "devastating" as it knocked out seven of the utlity's 12 substations and broke 330 poles.
Jacobus said the ice on Inter-County poles and lines in Boyle County was at least 2 inches thick.
"To date we've incurred over $3.3 million in storm-related expenses, and it could well hit $4 million," Jacobus said, noting he expects at least 75 percent to be covered by FEMA.
He said some of the expenses include housing, feeding and providing laundry service for the 250 to 300 workers from utility companies around the state and South and Midwest that assisted in the restoration project.
"All the power is back on, of course, but it will take another six months until we are completely finished with the restoration," Jacobus said. "There are still a lot of sagging lines that need tightening and other cleanup chores we need to do."
