PERRYVILLE — Power was cut to around 689 Citizens Electric Corporation members in northern Cape Girardeau County Saturday afternoon when heavy thunderstorms moved through the area.
The CEC’s Steve Elsea says one of those storms sent a lightning bolt that scored a direct hit on a pole near the Neely Substation off Route 177.
Elsea said that bolt “blew out several insulators (and) because the insulators had been blown off it took a lot longer to restore service. It wasn’t just a matter of going in and closing a breaker. We had to send crews out there and replace all the insulators that had blown.”
Elsea says fortunately the pole, itself, was not damaged.
“The pole did not have to be replaced, thank goodness. It very well could have and that has happened before. That would have taken even longer.”
He said the lightning bolt created quite a show which was witnessed by a nearby member.
“The first caller who reported the outage, thought the transformer had blown up, but what they had seen — all the sparks and such — were from the insulators and (as) the insulators are holding the wires apart and holding them off from the pole, what they were seeing was the shorting of those wires against each other and against the pole until the breaker at the substation finally opened.”
Power was restored in a few hours after the insulators were replaced.