Power restored to most AmerenUE customers in Cape Girardeau

A brief outage knocked out power to almost 2,300 customers of AmerenUE in the Cape Girardeau area Thursday morning. By 1 p.m., the utility's website reported power restored to all but 20 of those customers.

At 11:50 a.m., the AmerenUE website showed 2,277 customers without power in the 63701 ZIP code.

An AmerenUE representative said just before noon that crews were patrolling to find the cause of the outage, which affected customers mostly in the rural area northeast of Cape Girardeau.

AmerenUE spokesman Mike Cleary said the company was unable to determine the exact cause of the outage. Power was restored by resetting a "recloser," a device comparable to a circuit breaker, Cleary said.

The outage was the second widespread outage in Cape Girardeau in less than a month. On Aug. 13 nearly 1,500 customers experienced a power outage on a day when the heat index climbed to over 110 degrees.