At approximately 7:00 pm on Saturday May 16th we lost power out of our Downtown Plant Substation switchgear. The initial outage included approximately 1,030 customers. We discovered that we had major damage to our 4 kV switchgear that was not repairable. Our crews began the process of switching these feeders over to tie them into our West Iowa Substation feeders. This took some time to get everything moved around to temporarily restore power. Around midnight, all of our customers’ power had been restored. Our crews then began to install temporary infrastructure to be able to split some of our feeder loads up because the West Iowa Substation feeders wouldn’t be able to handle all of the additional load from the Downtown Plant Substation. This was due to the temperatures being high which causes extra loading on these feeders. At 1:00 pm on Sunday May 17th, we had to take another outage in order to move some of the load off the West Iowa Substation over to the temporary feed at the Downtown Plant Substation.
Behind the Grid: IMU’s Emergency Response
Storm Response for May 16
IMU’s Local Heroes Jump Into Action
We had eight employees respond to the initial outage and later swapped out three linemen due to the length of the outage. The crew’s working conditions were difficult due to all the rain and lightning. Our Customer Service Center would post updates to our Facebook page when new information was available. We understand that our customers would like to have specific timelines on when power will be restored during an outage. Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables that go into restoring power like the weather, extent of the damage, getting the materials needed to make the repairs and making sure our employees are able to work safely. IMU wants to restore the power to our customers just as much as our customers want their back power on.
IMU’s Long-Term Restoration Strategy
We are continuing to work on temporary solutions due to the material that it will take for a permanent solution has a long lead time. Our engineers have worked with us evaluating our options. The replacement switchgear equipment has been ordered. There is some prep work that will take place before then to try and speed up the process of getting everything back to normal. During these processes we will need to have some scheduled outages. Notices of these planned outages will be relayed through our Facebook account.
