Equipment failure to blame for St. Joseph power outage

By NewsPress Now

The lights are back on in St. Joseph after an early-morning outage left much of the city in the dark.

At one point, almost 30,000 customers were without power in the area. The incident forced the St. Joseph School District to cancel classes on Wednesday.

Courtney Lewis, a senior communications manager with Evergy, said a piece of equipment failed at one of the substations serving St. Joseph just before 4 a.m. Wednesday. A contributing factor to the size of the outage was the fact that another substation serving St. Joseph is also partially out of service as Evergy is in the process of expanding and updating it, she said.

Crews were able to restore all customers as of 6:45 a.m., she said.