(Spirit Lake)– A power outage late this (Fri.) afternoon and evening put portions of the lakes area in the dark, heat and humidity for upwards of several hours.
At it’s height the outage affected the southern and southeastern areas of the city of Spirit Lake, Okoboji and a portion of Arnolds Park.
A spokesman with Alliant Energy tells KUOO news the outage began around 4:45 or so this (Fri.) afternoon. Those in the southern and southeastern portions of Spirit Lake were the last to have power restored. The power in those areas didn’t come back on until shortly before 9:00 p.m. Other areas weren’t out as long.
The spokesman with the company’s communication’s department told KUOO news they had to bring the power back on to small areas at a time so as not to over load the system which is experiencing an extremely high demand due to the extreme heat and humidity.
The spokesman says Alliant Energy’s transmission provider, ITC, had decommissioned one of two primary transmission lines for maintenance when the demand became too heavy to be handled by just the one line, causing some equipment to overheat. He says crews were able to re-route power, to some areas, but others had to wait for equipment to cool back down before the load could be switched back onto it.
