Wildlife causes significant power outage in central Emporia

Repairs took several hours on a significant power outage that developed in central Emporia on Saturday.

Power went offline around 5 pm in a box bordered by Ninth on the north, Fourth on the south, State on the east and Rural on the west. Evergy Director of Corporate Communications Gina Penzig says the outage was caused by wildlife and forced repair crews to initially reroute power so the damaged circuit could be de-energized and then fixed.

About 1,900 customers were affected, but Penzig says the vast majority were not offline throughout the entire outage. Power was fully restored around 10 pm.