HOW CAN ONE POWER LINE CAUSE SUCH A BIG PROBLEM?
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 -- 12:54 PM
Customers don't expect the power to be off for six hours when a power pole is knocked over.A driver toppled a pole in Neillsville Monday morning causing an outage that affected over 1,100 local customers.
"Neillsville is served by one station. It has three feeders," explains Xcel spokesperson Liz Wolf Green, "This feeder takes power from the substation and distributes it throughout an area serving hundreds of customers to several thousand customers."
"This pole that was his was a critical feeder," she explains.
Wolf Green says 5 linemen worked on the downed line and had to reset the pole and 100-feet of wire.
The project was slowed for safety reasons.
"One thing that took a little bit longer is they had to work very carefully around a We Energies gas main, which was very close to where the power pole broke off," Wolf Green says.
Most of the affected customers were without power from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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