Thousands lose power in Washington County

WASHINGTON — Thousands of Alliant Energy customers started Tuesday without power, after a scheduled transmission switching in the Washington County area went wrong around 8:20 a.m.

Melissa McCarville, an Alliant spokesperson, said the outage affected a total of around 5,600 customers, running through Keota, Wellman, Riverside, Kalona, Washington and some rural areas nearby. She said the cause was still unclear, by the time power came back around 10:30 a.m.

“When performing our switching, there was a yet-to-be-determined cause that created an unplanned outage,” she said in an email. “Multiple distribution areas were impacted.”

An outage map provided by the company showed many customers had their lights back on in Washington County shortly before 9 a.m., although over 2,000 customers were still down in the Keota area. That number dropped to below 1,000 around 10 a.m., before power was restored totally at 10:30 a.m.

A text alert from the city of Riverside said Alliant was dealing with a substation failure there around 8:40 a.m., but it wasn’t clear whether that was related to the transmission switch issue mentioned by McCarville. Municipal officials said the utility was rerouting power and working on repairs, at that time.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com