Ameren Missouri reported at 4:20 p.m. today (Jan. 22) that all electric customers in the Festus-Crystal City area who experienced a brief outage have their power back on.
About 600 customers were without power while the problem was fixed, Ameren spokeswoman Brianne Vaught said.
The utility sent out a “trouble man” to investigate earlier this afternoon, after receiving reports of intermittent power outages. He turned off the power to fix the problem, she said.
Outages occurred along Truman Boulevard near the Festus-Crystal Elks Lodge 1721, 4 Elks Acres, in Crystal City.
Festus and Crystal City residents posted on Facebook that the outage extended from the Walmart Supercenter, 650 S. Truman, to the Subway restaurant, 205 N. Truman.
“Everybody is back on,” Vaught said. “They were experiencing momentary blinks in power (outages) – about 15 of them – between 2:30-3 p.m.”
She said the system was doing what it is supposed to do.
“Winds were blowing a wire that was hitting a tree branch,” Vaught said.
When that happens, the system detects the wire hitting the object and turns off the electric power. When the wind blew the wire away from branch, the power came back on, she said.
The repairman turned off the electricity for about 20 minutes while he took the slack out of the line, she said.