Goeddeltown Road and Fountain Substation Outage

Because of some misinformation, we were made aware of in the media about two past outages, MCEC wanted to set the record straight on what transpired during the following two outages. MCEC has always made it our TOP PRIORITY to provide the best service possible to the membership, especially during outage situations.

Goeddeltown Road Outage

On Tuesday, December 29th, a 3-phase pole guy wire was hit on a corner of Goeddeltown Road, east of Waterloo, at approximately 11:10 pm.  A teenager reported that a car going in the opposite direction forced him off the road and caused him to hit our guy wires. The guy wires caused the top of the pole to break off and cause an outage.

This outage affected a significant amount of members, including several subdivisions, and could not be restored until the pole was changed out that night. Power was restored at 5:20 a.m. the next morning. The pole affected was a 3-phase corner pole that was double guyed. Because of the complexity of this pole and the limited visibility at night, we had a longer outage time.

Fountain Substation Outage

On Wednesday night, January 6th, at approximately 10:15 p.m., there was an outage situation down at our Fountain substation.
A vehicle of some sort ran off the road and hit a guy wire from a pole at the entrance to the Stuckmeyer Farm down by Fountain. The guy wire apparently flew up into and welded across the 3-phase line. This accident was not reported and we were not aware of this situation when the linemen were dispatched for this outage.
When the linemen arrived, they found one phase out for the whole substation. They immediately tried to bring back on that phase for the north and south feeders. The south feeder came on the first time, but the north feeder kicked back out so they proceeded to walk the railroad tracks north to find the problem. It was snowing that night so it was very difficult to see.
To get that line back on, it was then decided to try and back feed it from the Columbia substation. When the line was reenergized from Columbia, the guy wire that was wrapped in the phases burned down. Because of the larger breaker sizes at Columbia, the breaker did not trip out as it did at the Fountain substation. This caused a flash and small fire that the linemen saw. They realized then where the problem was and proceeded with the repairs. The fire department was dispatched for this also.

After the repair, the line was re-energized at 4:50 a.m.