Power outage leaves 2,000 in the dark

    Nearly 2,000 homes and businesses in and around Washington were without electricity for an hour and a half Thursday afternoon in an unanticipated power outage. According to Alliant Energy representative Scott Drzycimski of Cedar Rapids, the outage was caused by a malfunction in a transmission line owned by ITC Midwest that occurred at around 4 p.m. Thursday. The outage affected customers on the east side of the city and in rural areas east of town. Drzycimski said that rural areas just outside of Wayland were also affected.

    Drzycimski reported that the transformer in Washington that was hit by the outage was the one near the former Crane building on North 12th Avenue, and that was why only the eastern part of town was affected.

    Jeremy Patterson is in the process of moving the Mills Seed Building from North Seventh Avenue to North Iowa Avenue, and asked ITC to de-energize power lines along the route. Alliant Energy engineers Don Peters and Don Kelchen said that ITC de-energized a few lines on Wednesday when the building passed under ITC?s lines. There was no power outage Wednesday because ITC was able to reroute electricity in its grid by shifting the load from the de-energized lines to nearby lines that carried the electricity to its intended destinations. However, when ITC was restoring the normal load to its lines Thursday, the motor operator switch on one of the lines malfunctioned and produced the power outage.

    Peters and Kelchen said that no one in town was notified of the power outage in advance because it was unexpected. They said power can normally be moved seamlessly from one line to another without causing a power outage.

For more, see our Feb. 26 print edition.