Ameren's System Maintenance

Jefferson City News Tribune:

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigation has found that Ameren executives often insist publicly they've done all they can to limit storm outages, but tell regulators in writing that they must spend more money on programs to boost reliability.

At the same time, Ameren relies on tree trimmers to inspect the vast majority of the power grid even though the trimmers' union says they're not trained to spot many problems.

Regulations can be lax. Neither Missouri nor Illinois have hired outside engineers to investigate the outages.