By Eric Stock
BLOOMINGTON – Ameren officials say they still don’t know what caused the malfunction that prompted crews to shut off power to much of downtown Bloomington on Wednesday.
Spokeswoman Stacey Shangraw said crews were alerted to an alarm which signaled a problem with underground lines, something she compared to a ‘check engine’ light.
“Our coworkers immediately made the decision to make an immediate repair, shut the power down, cut the wires and then bring the power back up through the other wired redundancy that fed the downtown,” Shangaw said.
The power was out for about 15 minutes throughout much of a 15-block area, but some businesses were without power for hours.
Shangraw said the repairs needed to be made quickly so there wasn’t time for much advance notice.
“We didn’t have time to get notice out to the customers that were going to be impacted but yet we knew we needed to make that repair immediately,” Shangraw said.
The city of Bloomington posted alerts on social media shortly before the outages which hampered a number of downtown businesses during the lunch hour.
Eric Stock can be reached at eric.stock@cumulus.com.
