STORM DARKENS JACKSON; CAPE HIT BY SMALL OUTAGE SATURDAY

JACKSON -- The city of Jackson was literally in the dark early Saturday after lightning apparently struck an electrical substation and Union Electric was forced to shut down a 34.5 kilovolt line providing power to the city.

An unrelated and isolated power outage occurred in Cape Girardeau Saturday morning, a Union Electric spokesman said.

The Jackson power outage occurred at 12:15 a.m. Power to the city began to be restored at 12:50 a.m. Saturday, but some areas remained without power for more than an hour, said a spokesman at Jackson's municipal power plant.

The outage activated a number of burglar alarms. Traffic lights were out all over the city, but no major problems were reported, police said.

"They had a lightning arrester. It blew up in their industrial substation," said a UE spokesman, who asked for anonymity.

The arrester is a piece of equipment designed to protect electrical equipment by carrying the lightning charge harmlessly to the ground, the spokesman said.

But when the arrester in the city-owned substation blew up during Saturday's storm, it left a big jumper wire swinging in the wind. "It (the wire) kept hitting a piece of steel and it would relay all the way back" to a UE substation, the spokesman said.

"It relayed 32 times," he said.

"In order to protect our equipment, we had to send our people out and put Jackson in the dark until they (Jackson utility personnel) repaired the jumper," he explained.

The UE spokesman said the utility company had to shut off power to Jackson to avoid damaging an electrical breaker at the UE substation.

He said there was initially some confusion as to whether the problem was in the UE system or in Jackson's city-owned substation. UE personnel were called out and discovered it was a city problem. The city was then notified of the situation and city utility personnel were called out to deal with the problem at the substation.

Jackson purchases power from UE and other utility sources, but also can generate its own power when necessary.

A Jackson power plant spokesman said Saturday that the plant's generators were used to help provide some emergency power.

As to the power outage in Cape Girardeau, the UE spokesman said a squirrel apparently got into a transformer in the vicinity of 2813 Gordonville Road, shorting it out at 7:28 a.m. Saturday.

The outage affected only a small number of customers, he said. Power was restored to most customers by 8:15 a.m., and to all customers by 9:47 a.m.