Much of Hutchinson began Wednesday without electricity.
A transmission line fault at Hutchinson Utilities Commission's northeast substation caused a domino effect, which left all of the city north of Century Avenue without power from about 6:30 to 7 a.m.
“The majority of the town was black,” said Jeremy Carter, Hutchinson Utilities' general manager.
The fault at the substation, according to Carter, “tripped the breaker at the downtown substation by our downtown (generating) plant, and it knocked out the downtown plant.”
By 7 a.m., workers at the northeast substation — north of State Highway 7 and behind Valley Sales — had restored power to almost all of the city. The only customers without power included TDK Hutchinson Technology, Uponor and Midwest Industrial Tool Grinding Inc. All three used their own backup generators until their power came back on.
Carter apologized for not being able to respond to all the customers calling Hutchinson Utilities to report the outage.
“When something like this happens, we get customers calling us from all over town,” he said.
At the same time, Hutchinson Utilities was taking calls from other agencies connected to the power grid wanting to know what was going on. Carter said he is working on setting up separate communication lines for those agencies so that in the event of future outages, all customer calls can be answered.
