A Power Outage Affecting 5 Counties and No Mention in the News...

Last Thursday, February 7th, at around 6:42pm, people in 5 counties lost power for nearly 3 hours. The weird part of it all is that it has not been mentioned by any of the multimedia outlets in this area. I live in central South Dakota on the Missouri River in Buffalo County. There was no mention of it while the local radio stations were broadcasting basketball games during any of their breaks...no mention of it on the Local News channels, and finally no mention of it in our local newspapers. There has been no cause for the outage given out publicly and only rumors are flying around. You would think that something like this might be quite newsworthy. Yet, nothing has been reported.

My question for anyone here is, would an event like this be worthy enough for anyone to not want to have made public other than those affected? I could understand the electric company not wanting bad publicity, but to get all the Media outlets here to not say anything?

Do you all have power again? And was it weather related?

Funny (not really, but you get my gist I think). Even over here we heard about "300.000 people in the western part of the US disconnected from electricity".

Nothing was detailed about the counties or such, but that would have been a little too much detail for over 8.000 km distance.

I can't imagine a local news blackout being for any reason other than to prevent a panic. Since I am assuming that this happened earlier than just this moment - one can extrapolate that there might be an infrastructure problem that the folks in power don't want the locals knowing about - until they've figured out how to fix it.

Just a guess.

~Heff

I can't imagine any reason for hiding it, unless it was a mistake by someone in a high place.

reply to post by ManFromEurope


Power was restored about 3hrs later...like within minutes of 3hrs exactly. I've searched online trying to use every combination of keyword I could think of and have come up empty. The outage didn't affect like a whole block area of people..it ranged from Hyde County to our north..then east of us and the eastern part of Brule county to our south. There was a 29 mile long wind farm that was affected as well..which I kinda find ironic. heh. It was kind of spooky to look to the east and see almost total darkness. It was a little odd that a few yard lights were still working even though power was off to homes without generators.

reply to post by ManFromEurope


8000km????? Uhhh, you do realize the US is approximately 3000miles(4828.032km) across right?

Or were you talking 8000sqkm

How large is a county? County is smaller than a state right? So 5 counties in one state, or different states? Power outages happen, no system is perfect. If these 5 counties were all supplied by the same power company I'm not surprised. 3 hrs with out power isn't that big of a deal. Some areas get their power knocked out for days, weeks or longer by random crap. I wonder how many preppers have locked themselves in their shelters

reply to post by Thunder71


Solar yard lamps are pretty popular these days... They charge their batteries in the daylight and run all night.

I lived in South Dakota when pretty much the entire state lost power because of a wicked ice/snow storm. They were able to get power up on a massive level in a matter of a week, maybe a little more than that.


Doesn't seem like a big deal, they probably figured they would have it under control rather quickly. No sense in making mountains out of molehills. Chances are it was reported once or twice, and that was the end of that. Five counties isn't very many, and in SD that means like five people lost power, haha.

Could it have been mentioned while your power was out?

Whenever there is a power outage where I live, they usually only run a 30 second segment to mention it. Power outages arn't big news to the media I guess. You'll most likely see it mentioned in your local paper tomorrow, if not then I dont know.


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reply to post by strafgod


What happened to the days when the power went out and you just lit a few candles? Why is it so seemingly sudden that a loss of power is a " big deal." It's never been news worthy in my eyes, unless it's been about a week or more.

reply to post by Hijinx


Well considering other power outages are reported on same day if possible here in the state, the fact that this one wasn't reported on is what kinda concerns me a little. This was before all the bad weather of Orko came through by the way. We didn't start getting effects of that storm till Saturday night. If you've lived here in South Dakota. An area north to Highmore south to the Buffalo/Brule county line (the house across the line had power the house before the line didn't) East to Gann Valley, South to Kimball, East to Wessington Springs then North right up to Huron. Miller to the north of Wessington Springs and Gann Valley had power as that was were the Wessington Springs boys were playing Miller at on the radio.

Originally posted by Hijinx
reply to post by strafgod

 

What happened to the days when the power went out and you just lit a few candles? Why is it so seemingly sudden that a loss of power is a " big deal." It's never been news worthy in my eyes, unless it's been about a week or more.

I too, never realized a power outage was newsworthy. You know while it's happening so no one needs to tell you about it, and to find out why it's out, call the power company. Ours usually has a recorded message saying why, and how long it's expected.

Unless the phones are also out.....

I guess if the power outage was ever mentioned on the news, I would have missed it anyways, 'cause the power would have been out...

I guess my real underlying question was...why report other outages complete with the cause and not mention a word of this one when the area of the outage has been greater then previous ones that were reported?