PEABODY — Several residents and businesses in the downtown area of the city, including City Hall, suffered a loss of power shortly before noon on Friday.
Peabody Municipal Light Plant Director of Human Resources and Community Relations John Maihos estimated that approximately 200 people were affected with either full or partial outages, and that power was restored to all customers about two hours later.
Maihos said repair crews were dispatched to an area on Lowell Street near the Ancient Order of Hibernians after learning about the outage. Technicians discovered a primary cable in a three-bank unit was damaged, leaving many customers with partial power.
“We don’t know the reasons why it was damaged,” Maihos said. “It could have been an animal or something rubbing against something, but it just happened and the cable failed.”
Maihos said power at the light plant also “flashed.”
“We feel those things too and we can see it on our screens,” said Maihos. “In any case, we were able to isolate the area until a majority of people outside of the general area were brought back to normal in about 45 minutes to an hour.”
Maihos said a smaller group of customers near the “core area” of City Hall and St. John the Baptist School and Church faced full outages for approximately two hours while repairs were being made.
The impact to the school wasn’t as disruptive as it could have been due to the fact that the students had the day off for teacher development training, Maihos noted.
“It was good timing and less of a problem for them today with the kids out of school,” said Maihos. “We were able to reactivate the circuits in that area and get everything back into a normal state pretty much in just a couple of hours.”
