A widespread power outage overnight knocked out service to roughly 3,000 West Penn Power customers in Butler County.
The majority of the outages early Thursday morning were in Center Township.
“We have a substation near the Clearview Mall and in that substation we have some very large transformers,” West Penn Power spokesman Todd Meyers said Thursday. “One of the transformers had an equipment issue.”
Power was initially knocked out about 1:30 a.m. Thursday. The entire Rt. 8 corridor from Route 422 north into Center Township was in the dark.
“Crews had to shift all of the customers onto a different transformer,” Meyers said.
Power was restored to the majority of customers around 7 a.m. Lingering outages persisted until about 10 a.m.
Meyers isn’t sure if the outage was at-all related to the windy weather we had on Wednesday.
“We don’t know if this was weather-related. We do test and look at our large transformers- especially prior to the winter time- but there is a lot of equipment out there and it is subjected year-round to all different kinds of weather,” he said.
The outage did temporarily cause two Butler Radio Network stations- WBUT 1050AM and WLER The Rock Station 97.7 FM – to get knocked off the air. You can always listen to the stations online or through their free mobile apps even in the event of a power outage.
