City officials still are looking for the culprit to a computer failure prompting a power outage that left some area residents without electricity for more than eight hours overnight.
Iola City Administrator Carl Slaugh said the outage started shortly after 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and didn’t end for some residents in Gas until 5 a.m. today.
The outage occurred after Iola crews began generating electricity at 8 p.m. Wednesday to accommodate work at the city’s substation in Bassett.
“We had picked up the entire load as planned,” Slaugh said. “It seemed like it was a spotless transition.”
But a “computer problem” caused a citywide system failure about 30 minutes later, Slaugh said, which effectively idled Iola’s two Wartsila generators for the night.
The outage caused Russell Stover Candies and Gates Corporation to sent their night crews home.
Electric crews scrambled for the next several hours trying to fire up both Wartsila units and a series of diesel generators.
The ongoing computer problems prevented crews from getting the Wartsilas back online at all, and only three of the five diesel generators were functioning through the night.
“There was something in those circuits,” Slaugh said. “We’d get one part of town back online, but the circuits would drop off again.”
Electric crews worked at several spots around town, while Slaugh and power plant employees worked there overnight.
The three diesel generators helped the city generate about 7.5 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply power to much of Iola after officials at Russell Stover Candies and Gates Corporation closed for the night.
Most parts of town had power restored by 11 p.m. Wednesday, although others in east Iola and Gas did not have power restored until the city hooked back on to the Westar system.
With the two factories online, the city’s electrical load was at about 13 megawatts.
The Wartsilas, when functioning properly, are capable of producing 10 megawatts of electricity. The five diesel generators can produce another 12.5 megawatts, Slaugh said, or about 2.5 megawatts apiece.
Not so coincidentally, Slaugh noted Iola City Council members recently approved a $140,000 upgrade to the Wartsilas’ two computer control systems, because the current system is more than 10 years old.
