News : Equipment problems, weather caused brief REC outages Thursday

On Thursday, June 10, around 3:45 p.m., transmission equipment southwest of Vinton lost power. This equipment provides power to eight of East-Central Iowa Rural Electric’s substations, including the Garrison, Karr Harrison, Spring Creek, Shady Grove, Lindahl, Becca and Big Grove substations.

This transmission outage caused outages to these eight ECI substations and affected 3,745 ECI REC member-consumers primarily located in Benton and the edges of a few adjoining counties. Member-consumers were without power from as little as 11 minute, with some without power up to 3 hours.

In addition to the transmission outage, ECI also experienced outage calls due to high winds and tree damages located at, or near the Garrison, Harrison, Lindahl and Walker substations. These distribution outages affected 391 member-consumers for a time period of 40 minutes, up to 3 hours.