Power outage affects hundreds

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A power outage caused by a blown fuse left about 300 area Roughrider Electric customers without power Tuesday morning, said Simon Kuntz, chief of staff and line superintendent for the company.

An outage Monday evening due to a faulty cable affected about 200 customers, he added.

The incidents were caused by separate issues and both outages lasted about 45 minutes, Kuntz said.

Sky Wilson, store manager at Dickinson’s Wal-Mart SuperCenter, said the outages affected the store.

“In situations like that, you know, we have to protect our food products, so we insulate our bunkers and in some cases we actually remove the product and return it to our freezers and coolers to make sure the temperatures are still correct,” Wilson said.

He added no food was lost due to either outage.

During the first outage, they were able to operate their registers on a battery backup, but since that drained the batteries, they were not able to do so during Tuesday’s outage, he said.

“We had some customers who wanted to shop in the dark and ultimately they made their way up to the front and there were no accidents or incidents,” Wilson said.

However, customers had to be turned away when registers were down, he added.

Kuntz didn’t expect any other incidents and the problems were fixed by Tuesday afternoon.

Tags: power outage, news, walmart, dickinson