Power Outage a Mystery?

Annabel Zimmer-12

03/5/2019

Small School Power Outage a Mystery?

Last Thursday, the school’s power went out for about 30 seconds, causing lights to flicker, and all computers and electronic devices to shut down. The outage seemed to be a mystery. Tricia Reger at central office suggested contacting the schools district’s energy company, Ameren. After two emails, and a phone call leaving me on hold for 30 minutes the mystery remained. However, there was a perfectly explainable reason for the call center to not have detected the outage.

In an email response, The Customer Relationship manager at the Kirksville site, had a perfectly reasonable explanation. “A tree limb made contact with an adjoining electrical circuit. When there is a contact or fault on our power lines, the system is designed to shut down for protection much like a fuse or circuit breaker in your house. Because of our ‘smart’ fuses, the power goes off for a few seconds then is restored if the system senses the fault is no longer there. In this situation, likely a tree limb falling and hitting the line then going on to the ground, effectively clearing the fault. Since it was on an adjoining circuit, the circuit that the school is on ‘saw’ the blink as the system performed it's clearing operation.”

This made total sense, since we had had lots of snow and ice piling up, easily knocking a tree limb onto a power line.

The outage did not last long enough for the company to have even recorded it, but I know some students suffered from the small blackout. Seger Nelson, 12, said the outage occurred while he was taking a statistics quiz for his online class. When the power went out, his computer lost power, and therefore lost his quiz. Don’t worry though, he was able to finish it and everything ended up alright.