ISU Power Restored After Citywide Blackout

While the was able to restore power in a relatively short time after a citywide Tuesday, officials at worked long into the night to restore power to all buildings.

One man became overheated in the hot ISU Power Plant and was sent to the hospital for an evaluation but Jeff Witt, Director of Utilities at the ISU Power Plant, said the employee expected to return to work today.

Power was restored to all University buildings by about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday following a citywide outage that started just before 3 p.m. when a tree limb hit a transmission line connecting substations in Boone and Ames.

Both the City of Ames and Iowa State University are connected to the same power grid and were buying power from outside sources when the tree limb fell, knocking out power to plants at both places. The city of Ames had some back up generators but Witt said the University didn't have that.

“It took awhile to get back in service,” Witt said.

Witt said it's been at least 25 years since the University lost power completely.

“I cannot remember a time when all of ISU and Ames both went down,” Witt said.

Witt is unsure why the tree fell. It was windy Tuesday, but not much more than usual.

Witt said they will discuss contingency plans to avoid such an outage in the future. One of the things that might have helped is construction of a second tie in line south to Ankeny. The existing line is small, Witt said. Both the university and the City of Ames have been pursuing a second tie-in line to the south.

In a prepared statement Assistant Electric Director Brian Trower stated that the outage reinforces the need for the second line.

“This is a compelling example of why additional transmission is needed,” Trower said.