Shoppers walk down the spiral staircase at the Shady Lady in downtown Centralia on Wednesday afternoon. A downed powerline caused about 1,930 Centralia City Light customers to be without power on Wednesday and issues at the Main Street substation kept it off well into the afternoon.
A downed powerline caused about 1,930 Centralia City Light customers to be without power on Wednesday and issues at the Main Street substation kept it off well into the afternoon.
Centralia City Light Superintendent Mike Evans said the outage started around 9 a.m. this morning when an overloaded powerline overheated and melted.
Residents and businesses downtown and north of West Main Street lost power for much of the day. The power came back on a couple times only to be knocked out again.
City Light crews responded by tying together three new feeder lines into an old one, but the surge of power was too much and caused a couple fuses to blow.
“When that happens and something goes wrong it makes it difficult to get the power back on,” he said.
As of 2:45 p.m., power had been restored to the majority of the affected, but Evans said it would be two or three more hours until the power was restored completely.
“We’re isolating customers off so we’re not picking up so much load at one time. You can’t just flip the switch, there’s too much load,” he said.
The new feeders at the Main Street substation are in the construction phase and are being tied into the old ones currently. Evans said the new ones should be fully online in a week and a half.
