Utility officials seek cause of outage

JACKSON, Mo. -- About half the city of Jackson was without power for 20 to 30 minutes Thursday, a problem that began around 7 a.m. and affected about 14,000 customers in Jackson and 1,400 AmerenUE customers in Cape Girardeau.

Mike Cleary, a spokesman for AmerenUE, said the company was still looking for answers for the power fluctuations. He said a 161,000-volt line, one of two that serves the electric substation northwest of Cape Girardeau tripped out completely. The other line should have carried the load, he said, but it didn't work properly.

Cleary said none of the AmerenUE customers had lengthy outages, only blips that lasted up to 10 seconds each.

In Jackson, where the city operates the electric utility, the entire city was without power for some time, said Don Schuette, director of electric utilities.

Schuette said it took about 30 minutes to get the power going again in over half the town.