Frankly, the National Guard should have been called out a whole lot sooner than yesterday. Imagine if 100,000 Chicagoans had been without power for 5 days in the freezing cold. Still, at least they’re out there now.

As hundreds of National Guard troops fanned out across iced-over central Illinois Tuesday offering help, residents shivering without power for a fifth straight day demanded to know why it is taking so long to restore electricity.

Thousands of angry and frustrated customers flooded utilities, state regulators and municipal halls with complaints. The Citizens Utility Board asked state regulators to investigate the response to storm-related outages that by late Tuesday still left about 100,000 Illinois customers in the dark.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday declared 49 Illinois counties disaster areas. At least two deaths in the metro East St. Louis region were attributed to the storm, but state officials say they have not received any reports of deaths associated with post-storm power failures.

But many were enduring severe conditions in their frigid homes.

People are frustrated, and they have a right to be. Power won’t be restored to most of Decatur until Friday. Still, people who take out their frustrations on Ameren linemen should be ashamed of themselves (and, yes, I’m including all those idiots in the SJ-R’s comment section for the past few days).

“God’s going to whup you!” she yelled at Steckel as he worked on the alleyway pole that would soon feed the home with power again. “Terrible, terrible service. I am very frustrated, and I’m not the only one frustrated. They are not concerned about the public, they’re not concerned about poor people. People are afraid to leave their homes, afraid someone’s going to break in. That man living over there has cancer.”

Steckel and Jim Pohlman, another Ameren lineman from the Carrollton area, remained silent as Chatman berated them and their employer. They had their own frustrations to deal with.

As darkness fell, they were trying to fix a power line that had been jury-rigged in the first place. Without the right-sized metal sleeves to connect two different-sized lines in the alley behind this house, they were forced to use universal connectors that required extra work. It was akin to having to tie a fish hook onto a line instead of simply snapping one into place with a clip. And they were doing it in freezing temperatures with gloves that were made for work, not comfort.

They’d spent all day in a slow house-to-house slog. They were making good money, but the criticism was tough to ignore.

*** UPDATE *** After initially approving all those nasty comments about Ameren linemen under its Sunday story, the SJ-R has finally hidden them from view.