EAGLE BUTTE, S.D. – Moving to the top of Mona Longbrake's must-have list is a portable generator.

She and hundreds of others on the sprawling Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in north central South Dakota are in their second week without electricity. And they have no idea when it will be restored.

"It's getting tiring," she said Monday, not long after contacting the utility company to get some sense of when the lights will be back on at her ranch southeast of Eagle Butte.

"Sometime this week — perhaps," was the answer, she said.

A fierce ice storm hit the reservation Jan. 20, coating roads and electrical lines and forcing shops and schools to close. Before residents could recover from the ice, a blizzard tore through the Dakotas, bringing a few inches of snow and wind gusts between 25 and 50 mph.

The power outage led to equipment malfunctions at a pumping plant in a pipeline system that provides drinking water to the reservation. Water service and pressure must be restored gradually in an old system with weak pipes, said Tribal Chairman Joseph Brings Plenty.

About 8,000 people live on the reservation that covers an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Brings Plenty estimated that 1,500 to 1,700 homes were still without power Monday, and said it would take "better than three weeks" to get the reservation up and running again.

The ice storm toppled thousands of power poles and pulled down transmission lines, caused water pipes to freeze and burst, and forced more than a dozen residents on kidney dialysis to seek treatment at another reservation.

Several shelters and distribution centers were set up around the reservation. At the height of the outages, about 14,000 people in the region were without water — most of them on the impoverished reservation.

The tribe says unemployment on the reservation, which includes Dewey and Ziebach counties, is at 80 percent. More than half of Ziebach County and 38 percent of Dewey County lived in poverty in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Brings Plenty said no deaths had been reported, but a few people became sick from carbon monoxide fumes given off by makeshift heating sources.

"We could have had quite a few people perish in this," he said.

Seventeen dialysis patients were moved to a hotel at the Prairie Winds Casino in southwest South Dakota, said Rick Shangreaux, the casino's acting general manager. Indian Health Services nurses are monitoring the patients, who will get treatment at a facility on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the casino is located.

Curtis Chasing Hawk, 56, was getting his thrice-weekly dialysis treatments at Pine Ridge after leaving the Cheyenne River reservation last week.

"The roads were all icy and the power was out," Chasing Hawk said. "We formed a five-car caravan and got out."

Longbrake said she and her husband, Delbert, have had no electricity or running water since Jan. 22. They have been drinking bottled water, cracking ice on a pond to get water to flush their toilet and using an oven range for heat.

"You get by as best you can," she said. "You make do."

Sonny Brave Eagle said he, his wife and their two young daughters have split time between an emergency shelter and a relative's house in Eagle Butte where four other families are staying.

He said he and his family spent six days in the dark at their home 12 miles north of Eagle Butte until law officers arrived to check on them.

"We didn't have a vehicle ... We had no phone, no batteries for the radio," he said. "We didn't know what was going on."

Water and power outages affected all of the reservation's residents, tribal spokeswoman Natalie Stites said.

By Monday, outages were no longer considered a crisis, but the tribe remained in "immediate response" mode, Stites said. The tribe has spent "enormous amounts" of money on such needs as fuel and water, she said, and an emergency fund with $175,000 a few months ago has been drained.

The South Dakota National Guard helped bring in generators from the state. The tribe distributed fuels such as propane, delivered donated bottled water and sent bulk water tanks around the reservation. Stites said the water deliveries met everyone's needs.

Electricity had been restored to most of the reservation's population centers, but hundreds of people in rural areas remain without power, said South Dakota Rural Electric Association spokeswoman Brenda Kleinjan.

Brings Plenty said the frozen ground complicated efforts to replace power poles, and snow had to be cleared away to allow utility crews to get close enough to rebuild transmission lines.

The number of water outages had declined Monday, with about 100 people still affected, said Tri County Mni Waste Water System general manager Leo Fischer.

Stites said reservation schools remained closed Monday.

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On the Net:

Facebook site for tribal disaster relief: http:// http://www.causes.com/crst2010disasterrelief

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Associated Press Writers Blake Nicholson and James MacPherson in Bismarck, N.D., contributed to this story.



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