Area blacked out for 3 hours
Staff writer
A Sunday evening blackout that impacted Marion and surrounding areas for nearly three hours was triggered by an equipment failure in an Evergy transmission system.
A Marion man had to be taken to St. Luke Hospital about 15 minutes after the power failure because his oxygen equipment would not work after he fell at home. No information on his condition was available.
“We had a piece of failed equipment on our transmission system that feeds two Flint Hills Rural Electric Cooperative substations and the city of Marion,” Evergy communications manager Kaley Bohlen said.
Circuits were switched, and power to Marion was restored about 7:45 p.m., Bohlen said.
Other substations were off until repairs were made, she said.
“It is believed that Flint Hills REC was able to perform switching on their side to restore power to those remaining customers,” Bohlen said.
Evergy completed its repairs around 10 p.m.
Flint Hills REC member services manager Travis Griffin said two of its substations were affected by the outage — its Marion substation, which serves areas north of US-56, and its Florence substation, which serves areas around Florence and northwestern Chase County.
“Once we were notified of what the problem was with Evergy, we were switching to feed from another substation,” Griffin said.
Griffin said the company had its customers back in service by 7 p.m.
Flint Hills REC provides services to portions of Chase, Dickinson, Geary, Harvey, Lyon, Marion, McPherson, Morris, and Wabaunsee counties.