Just before noon June 19, more than 1,700 Duke Energy customers in Zionsville lost electrcity. The outage affected both business and residential locations.
A failed underground cable caused the outage, according to Dan Rhodes, a manager for Duke Energy, who is responsible for community relations in Boone County.
“We are not exactly sure why it failed, but it did,” Rhodes said. “These are actually very rare.”
Approximately 300 of the customers who lost electricity quickly regained access to the grid, but the rest took slightly longer. All customers were fully restored by 4:30 p.m. the same day.
As part of the power restoration, some customers experienced a brief interruption at 4:15 p.m. as Duke switched from one circuit to another.
“We call that picking up the circuit,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes explained that Duke is in the middle of a major upgrade to the Zionsville Turkeyfoot Substation. There recently have been issues trouble with that substation, so Rhodes said his first inclination was to blame the substation for the outage. However, this particular outage was unrelated.
Rhodes said the rare underground cable failure was “just bad luck.”
