Alliant Energy unsure of power outage cause By Chloe Eklund, Ledger staff writer September 06, 2000 A problem with a transformer on Ninth Street interrupted power in some parts of Fairfield Tuesday afternoon, but officials with Alliant Energy haven't yet been able to pinpoint the cause. Some Alliant Energy customers in Fairfield, specifically those north of Highway 34, experienced a black-out Tuesday afternoon following the blow-out and fire of a station fuse on top of one of the Ninth Street transformers. The outage occurred about 1:15 p.m. Alliant Energy spokesman Dan Presser explained that the station fuse "basically protects the transformer from overload periods." But there was no overload, and Presser reports that the company is "still investigating" the cause of the blow-out. "It could be just one of those situations where it just blew," Presser said, comparing the blow-out to that of a household fuse that on occasion just burn out. He continued that the company is "looking into it again today," and will come to a conclusion about the situation toward the end of the week. "It didn't seem like it had been tampered with," said Presser. About 1,199 of the 8,000 Alliant Energy customers in the area were left in the dark for about three hours, with no one hurt and no businesses severely damaged by the lack of power. http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=822000&BRD=1139&PAG=461&dept_id=142642

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), September 07, 2000