Saturday's Manchester Area Power Outage Explained

As many of our readers noticed, the power went out for a big chunk of the afternoon on Saturday, during the wet winter weather we had. We called Terry DeDoes at Consumer's Energy to explain what happened. Terry replied:

"A failed insulator caused the Manchester 46kV line to lock out at about 12:45 p.m. Saturday and interrupted service to about 8,400 customers. We were able to isolate the area where the short on the system had occurred and restore service to about 2,400 of those customers about 2:30 p.m.  The final customers were restored at 8:05 p.m. when the repair work was completed."

For those of you playing along at home, there are about 3,000 homes in the Manchester Community School District, so the outage was considerably larger than just to Manchester Area.

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by Fritz Swanson

Fritz Swanson has written for The Believer, the Christian Science Monitor, Print Magazine, McSweeney's, Esopus, LSA Magazine, and The Mid-American Review. He serves as a trustee on the Manchester District Library Board. He's the designer and publisher of The Manchester Mirror.

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