Animal, not flood, behind Tuesday power outage

By Chris Baldus

Managing Editor

The flood had nothing to do with power going out in Charles City on Tuesday morning.

It was an animal’s fault. What kind? MidAmerican Energy’s spokeswoman didn’t know.

The outage was linked to problems at a substation in need of repair, Tina Potthoff said. “It was animal-related.”

Usually that involves a squirrel or a raccoon, but she didn’t know what kind of animal it was this time, or its condition.

The power blipped off at 9:03 a.m. for 2,666 customers in Charles City and outlying rural areas, she said. Roughly, the boundaries of the outage were the 1800 block of Cleveland Avenue, 2100 block of Underwood Avenue, 3000 block of 210th Street and the 2100 block of Cherry Street.

Power started coming back on about 9:30 a.m. with the last customer’s power restored at 10:44 a.m.