EXPLOSION OF BREAKER DOUSES CAPE'S LIGHTS

More than half of Union Electric's 17,000 Cape Girardeau customers were without power for up to nearly 90 minutes Friday afternoon.

About 9,000 of Union Electric's local customers went without power when a 34,500 volt circuit breaker exploded at the company's Viaduct Court Distribution Center near the southern city limits.

The outage, which occurred as temperatures were in the 90s, darkened signals at street intersections in the city, backing up the heavy flow of Friday afternoon traffic, police said.

Officers were dispatched to direct traffic. Some had to be sent out in their private cars with walkie-talkies in order to man all of the busy intersections.

A.D. Cox, superintendent of operations for Union Electric's Southeast Missouri district, said the explosion of the oil-filled breaker at 2 p.m. could have been caused by a bad insulator.

Calvin Break of Cape Girardeau wasn't very far away when the breaker exploded. Break was tending to his garden, located between old Highway 61 and Interstate 55, just west of the distribution center.

"I was working in the garden when I heard a great big bang. At first, I thought they had set off a blast at the (West Lake) quarry (on South Sprigg)," he said. "Then I turned around and looked toward the east and saw this great big cloud of black smoke blow up toward the north."

Cox said the failed breaker is one of two that isolate two 34.5 KV transformers from UE's Southeast Missouri power distribution network.

Both transformers are fed by 161,000-volt transmission lines that come into the center from generating stations in St. Louis, Arkansas, and the Joppa, Ill., Steam Plant.

The 34.5 KV transformers are considered a critical part of the power distribution network because they reduce voltage, then feed it from the distribution center to substations in the city and other parts of Southeast Missouri.

"We do not believe hot weather was the cause," said Cox. "Prior to the explosion, we were in good shape as far as the (electrical) load demand is concerned."

Cox said when the breaker failed, it cut off power to most of the Cape Girardeau substations. He said it also caused the 115,000-volt distribution line from the center to the Clark Street substation to relay, knocking out power to much of the central part of the city and business districts east of Kingshighway.

Cox said the Wiedekind substation, located at the junction of I-55 and Highway 61 in Jackson, was not affected, and continued to feed electricity to the Mt. Auburn and Glennwood substations, which serve the West Park Mall area, St. Francis Medical Center and the northwest residential area of the city.

Electrical service to Scott City, Chaffee, Gordonville, Oran, and other UE service areas was not affected.

A spokesperson for Southeast Hospital said the hospital operated on emergency power from 2-3:14 p.m.

Vince Seyer, director of the physical plant department at Southeast Missouri State University, said the campus lost power for about an hour and 20 minutes. "We suffered through the heat and darkness like everybody else," he said.

Seyer said the university's power plant was off-line when the outage occurred. When the plant is not operating, the university receives electricity from Union Electric.

"The plant is normally not in operation at this time of the year, and the power outage was so short, we wouldn't have had time to put it on line, anyway," he said.

Cox said electricity was restored to the city in sections to prevent damage to the remaining transformer and other substation transformers, and for safety concerns.

At 3:02 p.m., the 115 KV line to the Clark Street substation was re-energized, restoring power to about 700 customers.

At 3:14 p.m., another 4,500 customers in the middle and west end of the city had power. At 3:20 p.m., lights, air conditioners and computers in the downtown and east central part of town went back on for about 1,500 UE customers. The last area of the city to receive power was the south end and along South Kingshighway, which has about 2,300 customers

Because only one of the 34.5 KV transformers was affected, Cox said all of the electrical load fell on the remaining transformer, which quickly reached its capacity and began to overheat. To reduce the load on the transformer, Cox said electricity was drawn from the UE Oran bulk terminal to feed current to the Scott County area.

By midnight Friday, the damaged breaker had been repaired and the other 34.5 KV transformer was brought back on line.