The cause of a power outage at Butler Senior High School the first day students returned is going to require the replacement of a costly piece of equipment.
Butler Superintendent Dr. Brian White informed the school board Monday night that the outage was caused by the overloading of a transformer that is not capable of handling the power draw of the facility.
“Our transformer needs replaced. It’s a big piece of equipment. But the way it works, when you have a transformer, you pay for it and West Penn maintains it so lucky us. Who knew?,” White said.
West Penn Power is finding the electrical load capacity for a new transformer so a price is not available yet but depending on when the equipment becomes available, the district could be forced to transition to a remote instruction day in order to allow for instillation. Until then, West Penn and the district are carefully monitoring the power used by the repaired transformer to avoid another overload.
“My issue right now is that the high school stays on. I’m worried about it going out again. It’s functioning because we don’t have everything running. It’s functioning because it’s cooler outside,” White said. “The way it sounded to me is that this could go down again without careful monitoring. On those hot days, we were running fans on the transformer to keep it from going down.”
The Senior High outage did not have anything to do with an outage that occurred the same day at Center Township Elementary School.
