The city of Arnold and the Windsor C-1 School District had power outages this morning.
Ameren spokeswoman Jeni Hagen said the salt that has been applied to roads lately combined with this morning’s misty weather were the culprits.
“The salt creates a film on the lines and the mist breaks it down,” she said. “Salt is a conductor of electricity and our equipment is created to sense a change in the voltage and automatically shuts down the power (much like a breaker in a home).”
The phenomenon is not that unusual, Hagen added.
“It happens every year in the winter, but it’s usually not this widespread. It’s everywhere,” she said.
In addition to Arnold and Imperial, south St. Louis County, the Berkley area and many other areas around the St. Louis region had power outages, Hagen said.
“We had outages all over our service area due to the weather,” she said.
Parts of the city of Arnold, including the Public Works Department on Arnold Tenbrook Road, were without power for as long as seven hours, said Public Works director Ed Blattner.
“I arrived about quarter after six. It wasn’t five minutes and the lights flickered once, and boom the electric was out,” he said.
Blattner said the Metal Container Corp., the Browning plant and several industrial sites along Arnold Tenbrook Road were without power, too.
“The manufacturers on Manufacturer’s Drive, (however) had power,” he said.
In the Windsor School District, there was an outage that started about 6:30 a.m. and lasted about a half hour or so, Superintendent Joel Holland said.
“Overall it didn’t affect us. The buildings were prepared, the teachers were prepared, but the electric came back on just after 7 a.m.,” he said.
By this afternoon, all the outages were “contained,” Hagen said.
She said she hopes there aren’t other salt-related outages but said it’s possible.