By PETER KASPARI
Messenger staff writer
An issue with a piece of electrical equipment required the Webster County Law Enforcement Center to rely on a generator for power Wednesday.
Article Photos
-Messenger photo by Hans Madsen
MidAmerican Energy crews work Wednesday to replace a burned out transformer behind the Webster County Law Enforcement Center that caused the building to lose power for several hours.
A breaker in a transformer, located behind the LEC, failed late Tuesday night.
MidAmerican Energy crews spent much of the day Wednesday removing the old transformer and replacing it with a new one.
Chief Deputy Jim Stubbs, of the Webster County Sheriff's Department, said the LEC was expected to be back up and running by this morning.
While the LEC was on a generator, Stubbs said a few problems did arise.
"Any time we have an outage like this it causes issues," he said. "The generator goes on instantaneously once we lose power, but even though it's quick, there's obviously a gap, and that causes related issues."
He said the biggest issues impacted the dispatch center.
"Not everything in the building has power supplied by the generator," he said. "It also caused some problems with the comm center; some of the paging systems didn't work, and some of the radio frequencies didn't perform the way they were supposed to."
Stubbs added those problems were quickly fixed, and he said for the most part everything was running smoothly.
Tim Grabinski, a spokesman for MidAmerican Energy, said everything was expected to be on schedule, with both workers and the LEC making sure things went smoothly.
"We've disconnected them from our direct feed," he said Wednesday afternoon. "They'll do some maintenance on their end, and we'll do some on our end to make sure everything's fixed."
Contact Peter Kaspari at (515) 573-2141 or pkaspari@messengernews.net