The BPU is proud of our record of electrical reliability and service to our customers. However, sometimes storms, accidents, or other incidents out of our control interrupt electric service; such as the outage that occurred on June 20th, 2018.
At 2:14 am on June 20th lightning struck a pole on South Hickory Street. The strike shattered an insulator resulting in significant damage to the conductor and a ball of fire, taking out two electric circuits. One of the circuits feeds the Hospital, and residential customers in that area and the other circuit provides power to industries on West First Street. Power was restored in a little over an hour by the BPU employees who were either on call or called in to assist: Brad Steenson, Sammi Kleinsorge, Mike Neiman, Lenny Swaim and Todd Parsons. This event interrupted service for approximately 550 customers.
Outages are sometimes caused by issues out of our control; however, customers can rest easy knowing that when the power goes out, every minute counts for our crews. Once an outage is reported, BPU responds immediately to get our customer’s power restored quickly and safely.