OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – The idea of saving energy was not just aimed at homeowners on Mondays and Tuesdays. Businesses that use a lot of power have been asked to do the same.
For example, 6 News switched our transmitter for our tower here to generator and none of us are just out of the woods yet.
The power problems increased rapidly. We first called Bellevue homeowners yesterday.
“I heard the neighbor after the neighbor no longer had power,” said a homeowner in Bellevue.
Ten thousand customers lost power on Monday. OPPD turned off more electricity on Tuesday to ease the pressure of a Texas-to-North Dakota network that was ready to burst during record-breaking cold.
Neighborhoods from Elkhorn to Pepperwood and 90th and Dodge saw their lights go out. The ongoing eclipse deliberately took out 72,000 total customers in just over an hour per piece. The random outage even hit the home of Tim Burke, the head of the Omaha Public Power District.
“No preferential treatment there,” said OPPD spokeswoman Jodi Baker.
But as 6 News found out, some neighborhoods lost power and others did not.
Why? The short answer is: it depends.
Those with OPPD and NPPD say they pay attention to critical places where power is essential, such as schools, prisons, 911 centers, police stations, fire stations, nursing homes and hospitals. If you live near one of these places, you may have had a break.
Although many of these examples have generators because they never know when a tornado or squirrel may damage a transformer, decision makers are working to reduce the impact.
“We’re in a difficult situation again,” said NPPD chief executive Tom Kent.
With the possibility that there will be another downtime on Tuesday night and until Wednesday, those in charge of the power companies understand the difficult position they are putting on their customers.
There’s no way to say, ‘OK, at 8:00 we’ll interrupt. ‘Think of it as a tornado or an ice storm: it’s an emergency. “If that happens, our operators will take action to ensure that the reliability of the system does not deteriorate to an uncontrolled, widespread disruption,” Kent said.
6 News has been told that if there is another eclipse on Thursday night or Wednesday morning, they will try to target neighborhoods that have not lost power before – but there is no way to lose power again.
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