Widespread power outage affects area residents

BELDEN – A widespread power outage left people across northeast Nebraska in the dark for several hours July 26-27.

Grant Otten, media relations specialist with the Nebraska Public Power District, noted the outage occurred when a piece of equipment at NPPD’s Belden substation failed at about 9:05 p.m. July 26.

The outage affected four Cedar-Knox Public Power District substations, four Northeast Power substations and substations for the cities of Laurel and Randolph.

NPPD crews responded quickly to the Belden substation to work on repairs and bring affected substations back online.

Cedar-Knox, a wholesale customer of NPPD, and Northeast Power also both had crews respond to the outage.

Service was restored to the affected substations throughout the evening of July 26 into the early morning hours of July 27.

Mike Lammers, Cedar- Knox’s general manager, noted about 1,500 customers the Hartington-based public power district serves in the communities of Belden, Coleridge and Laurel, as well as the surrounding rural areas, lost electricity due to the outage.

“It affected us,” he said. “All we had to do was switch lines to get everything turned back on from alternate feeds. There really wasn’t a lot on our end.

“We just had to wait to get everything load-balanced and feed from different directions,” he said. “It takes a little time, but we worked with NPPD on that and we got that done.”

In Laurel, the city switched to locally produced power at its power plant until the incoming Cedar-Knox power was restored.

The city of Randolph, a wholesale municipal customer of NPPD, was affected by the outage as well.

Customers in the western part of Wayne-based Northeast Power’s service area also were impacted, including in the Concord, Dixon, McLean, Osmond and Randolph areas.