No Cause Found For Power Outage Monday Morning

There was a temporary power outage across the city of Washington and a few spotty outages in North Franklin, California Borough and South Strabane Township Monday morning. Todd Meyers of West Penn Power tells WJPA News that although they patrolled the line, they  did not find a cause for the outage. He say they reset their equipment and all customers were restored at 11:04 a.m. Meyers said they had contractors working on some power lines in the city to make upgrades that should result in more reliable electrical service for customers and to protect the crews as that work is underway, they had to change some settings on their equipment.  He says typically, if there is a minor issue like a tree branch momentarily contacting a line,  their equipment senses that contact, breaks the connection for a few seconds, and then closes back in to re-energize the circuit once the trouble has cleared.  Meyers says the lights sort of dim for a second, and then full power is restored.  According to Meyers, when crews are working around the lines, they don’t want the lines to automatically try to re-energize, so they change the settings so that when there is an intermittent issue, the power just stays off until they have investigated.  Sometimes, he says – they don’t find a cause because a branch may have fallen and bounced off the wire on the way down or something similar.  The outage also affected some traffic signals as well.