OUTAGE AFFECTS MALL STORES, 500 UE CUSTOMERS

About 500 Union Electric customers sat in the dark for two hours while the company routed power past a burned-out junction box at West Park Mall.

Doug Groesbeck, UE's district manager, said the box is located in Famous-Barr's parking lot and connects two cables. It will have to be pulled out of a conduit and repaired.

The burnout affected a part of West Park Mall, traffic lights on Kingshighway and businesses on Silver Springs Road.

UE employees began tracking the problem after several calls came into their customer service center. The company's computer reads where concerned customers are located and compiles a digitized map of the affected area, helping identify the probable cause of an outage.

Mall merchants weathered the problem in different ways. Famous-Barr didn't have to close thanks to its own generator. Store manager Jo Sharp said Famous was dark for only a brief while before backup lights came on.

"We only had 50 percent lighting, a limited number of terminals in operation and the air conditioner was off, but we didn't close," Sharp said.

At 16 Plus, employees weren't as lucky. They couldn't get the front gate down and spent the two dim hours on benches guarding the front of the store.

"People were just blindly roaming, asking `What's wrong? Why is everything closed?'" store manager Kathy Alexander said. "We were the information center."

The power came back on just after 2 p.m.

Around 4 p.m., rains and high winds hit Cape Girardeau, but mall power stayed on. UE's Groesbeck said only a few Cape customers had complaints, but thousands of others in the state experienced outages as the storm passed through their communities.