More than 8,500 lose power across Butler County
More than 10% of West Penn Power’s Butler County customers were without power for upward of two hours Wednesday afternoon, Sept. 20.
At one point in the early afternoon, the outage affected 8,555 of the company’s Butler County customers, with outages in more than 10 different municipalities.
“It started at 12:10 p.m.,” spokesperson Todd Meyers said. “It all stems back to: We’re having some kind of issue at our Krendale substation.”
Meyers said Butler Township had the most outages with nearly 5,000 customers without power at 1:47 p.m.
There were also upward of a thousand outages in Center and Clay townships. The company’s outage map reported 1,800 in Center Township and 1,160 in Clay Township at 1 p.m.
Nearly all customers in Franklin Township and Prospect lost power. A total of 633 customers in Franklin Township and 564 in Prospect were without power at 1 p.m.
Customers in Brady Township and Buffalo townships, Butler City, Connoquenessing Township, Connoquenessing, Jefferson, Penn and Worth townships were also affected.
Around 2 p.m., a number of the outages were resolved, bringing the total down to 7,088 total customers, or 8.31 percent of all Butler County customers.
By 2:30 p.m., Meyers said all power had been restored in the area affected by the substation issue. The company’s map listed 42 remaining outages in the county, with 36 of them in Cranberry Township.
“There was some kind of equipment issue at the substation, and we’re still working to figure out what it was,” Meyers said in the early afternoon.
Among the places impacted were a number of stores in Moraine Pointe Plaza, including Subway, Ollie’s Bargain Outlet and Thermax Clean Care Center. Each had signs in their windows indicating they were closed due to the power outage.
“We just decided to close because we can't really do much,” Sonya Huf, co-owner of Thermax Clean Care Center said.
Giant Eagle was partially open, but customers are encouraged to stay away from the refrigerated/frozen sections. The pharmacy drive-through lane was closed.
Steve Rodgers Locksmithing remained open, but was offering limited services.
“We don’t know what's caused it yet or how long it’s going to be down, so we’re just sort of hanging out until we know something,” owner Steve Rodgers said. “We can cut some keys. There’s certain things we can do with limited power, but there’s not a lot we can do.”
He said that much of the business’ work is done at other properties.
“Most of our work is done on site at other properties, so the store isn't a big foot-traffic location,” he said.
Meyers said that teams were temporarily reconfiguring the network to “mitigate and lessen the impact” during the outage, as well as working to restore power to the Krendale substation.
“We’re doing a couple of things right now,” Meyers said early into the outage. “We have crews out investigating.
“There may be an equipment issue or sometimes the larger line that feeds the station has no power.”
By 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, fewer than 5 customers were without power, according to the company’s outage map.
Eagle Staff Reporter William Pitts contributed to this report.
