Alliance power outage could have been damaging

Alliance residents were in the dark for just over three hours Wednesday night due to an equipment problem developed in a substation west of town.

The outage began at 8:45 p.m.

City Manager J.D. Cox says Western Area Power Administration crews traveled from Scottsbluff to Alliance to fix the problem.

Cox says electricians stated that had the repairs not been made immediately, substantial damage could have occurred to electronic devices due to a low voltage situation.

The equipment problem also effected Panhandle Rural Electric. PREMA Manager Ryan Reiber says a PREMA customer reported seeing sparking at the WAPA substation west of Alliance. PREMA employees discovered a broken jumper wire on the city-owned line that feeds the City. Since the problem caused the entire substation to go off line, 1,350 PREMA customers stretching from Lakeside to 15 miles west of Alliance lost power.

PREMA's outage lasted roughly 90 minutes.

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