A St. Joseph Police officer directs traffic at a busy intersection, Wednesday, as traffic signals and almost 50,000 KCP&L customers were in the dark.with no electricity.
Power appeared to be restored to much of St. Joseph by noon Wednesday after a regional outage knocked out electricity for around two hours.
The outage, which Kansas City Power and Light attributed to a tree that fell during regular maintenance, disrupted traffic signals across St. Joseph and sent workers outside as offices and buildings were left without electricity and air conditioning on one of the hottest days of the year.
The utility’s Web site showed that outages remained at about 1 p.m. in parts of Kansas City as well as Atchison County near Fairfax and Grant City in Worth County.
Up to 48,000 customers were without power in St. Joseph. Regionwide, the outage affected 68,000, including St. Joseph.
The outage, which occurred at around 10 a.m., originally hit areas as widespread as St. Joseph, Savannah, Stewartsville and Gower.
In St. Joseph, areas without power included Missouri Western State University on the east side of town and the Buchanan County Courthouse on the city’s west side.
Heartland Health was without power for a little less than an hour Wednesday morning, from 10:06 to 10:55 a.m., said marketing and communication coordinator Marcy George. But the medical center and clinics were never without backup power, as they switched immediately to generators.
Heartland also took action by enacting its hospital incident command system, in which representatives from each department meet to ensure all departments are able to communicate with one another.
Firefighters were dispatched to the Downtown Townsend and Wall apartment building to rescue at least one person who may have been trapped in an elevator. In addition, stoplights and streetlights stopped working. There were no reports of injuries.
An official with Kansas City Power and Light said the outage occurred when crews were doing routine maintenance and a tree fell on a transmission line in the St. Joseph area. The company did not say how many customers were without power.
The outage caused problems throughout the city, even disrupting a funeral. At the Buchanan County Courthouse, which lost power, the lights went out when Betty and John Anderson were meeting with an attorney. “Fortunately, our conference room was still cool,” she said.
Police were out at major intersections directing traffic.
Altec Industries told St. Joe Now that its employees were sent home because of the outage. About 450 hourly workers at the manufacturing facility were affected.
Power was restored at City Hall at 10:55 a.m. Other parts of Downtown had power restored at 11:25 a.m.