Power outage leaves residents in the dark

When the power went out Wednesday afternoon in Fredericktown at first it may not have seemed like a major ordeal. After all, it was a relatively cool early October day, and summertime outages not related to storm damage usually don’t last long.

But that wasn’t the case this time.

As of 7 p.m. the city remained without electricity. 

Mayor Kelly Korokis told the Daily Journal the cause of the outage was an Ameren UE feeder line which delivers power to the city-owned and operated grid.

She said Jeff Lawson, the city’s electric department manager, had been working with Ameren staff since the power went down at about 4:30 p.m.

Korokis said it was her understanding an Ameren crew was enroute from Potosi to find the problem and get it repaired. At that point the city workers could then systematically return power to the different areas of the community. 

Just after 8 p.m. a spokesperson with Madison Medical Center said everything was going well at the facility and they were operating on generator power.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. a lineman with Ameren was working on a line near the city’s electric department. He indicated he was finishing up repairing a damaged line, and then power would be brought up slowly so the city workers could begin feeding it through their grid.

Ironically the one bright spot, literally, in the city was the carnival rides and games being put in place for the county fair which kicks off this evening. Carnival workers were powering the rides and booths with a large generator, making the entire display stand out in the otherwise dark city blocks.

Word of power being back on began spreading a few minutes after 9 p.m.

An Ameren workers completes a repair to a feeder line late Wednesday evening. The faulty line was the cause of a city-wide power outage much of the late afternoon and into the evening.