Power Fully Restored to some 3550 Sidney MDU Customers

Sidney, MT (KEYZ)  A routine planned predawn outage sparks a mass power outage in Sidney late this morning, affecting more than 35 hundred customers. Mark Hanson with MDU says workers were performing maintenance on an east Sidney sub station line that was supposed to have taken only 15 minutes when a bigger problem popped up.

"We were disconnecting a portable transformer out of our Lewis and Clark power plant, so we had to take down our east Sidney sub station, but within that process there was some high voltage issues occurring," says Hanson.

The high voltage line issue caused them to switch all of the Sidney power to their west substation which took some 3550 customers off line for more than thirty minutes;

"What we had to do was switch lines and feed the entire town out of our West sub station and making the repair on that high voltage regulator now. So we had a thirty minute outage when we had to kind of switch everything over to the other sub station," says Hanson.

Hanson says there should be no further outages when they switch back to the east Sidney substation by the end of the day, Thursday.