The power went out for almost all of Petersburg around 5:00 a.m. Thursday for about an hour.
The Petersburg Borough’s utility department was repairing part of the power line at Scow Bay, a few miles south of town, with a planned outage. However, when utility linemen went to turn the power off for the isolated area, the borough’s power feed for everywhere north —the majority of Petersburg— was shut off.
“And that was not the plan,” said Utility Director Karl Hagerman.
The linemen rely on drawings of the system to know which circuit the infrastructure is on and guide their work. Hagerman said they had carefully planned for the maintenance, but it didn’t go accordingly; the information was inaccurate and hadn’t been updated in decades.
“Unfortunately, our drawing was not correct,” he said. “That led to a much larger portion of our system being out of power than we had planned.”
Hagerman said an error like this isn’t normal for the department’s operations, and it shed light on the need to update the drawings.
He said the whole power utility staff is “chagrined” about the situation because not only did it take most of Petersburg temporarily offline, unplanned, but working with incorrect information poses a significant safety risk for the power linemen.
“It’s very frustrating for all of us,” said Hagerman. “This shouldn’t have happened. And, you know, we’re moving forward with more information and more accurate information, so that will serve our customers.”
Despite frustration, no one was harmed and the maintenance work was completed. Hagerman said the department is updating the drawings to prevent future issues.
