Baldwin City on backup power after storm, asks residents to curb electricity use

photo by: Baldwin City

Story updated: 12:54 p.m., June 12, 2018

After overnight storms knocked out power around Baldwin City, city officials are now asking residents to curb their electricity use to ensure the city’s backup power system can handle the load.

The city is asking all electric customers to voluntarily reduce their consumption of electricity until further notice, the city posted to its Facebook page shortly after noon Tuesday.

Several power poles were broken east of town, the city said, and the main transmission lines to the city were knocked down during the storm.

“KCP&L is currently working to rebuild those lines but we do not know when service will be restored to the city,” the city said in the post. “The city electric department is currently generating power through the city’s power plant and will continue to do so until the transmission lines are restored. However, the system is reaching the maximum that the city power plant can produce so we are asking all customers to help reduce that demand.”

The city added that all city facilities would be reducing electricity consumption, and that they would announce when KCP&L has restored transmission to the city.

Power went out at 12:30 a.m., and the city was running on city generation since 1:15 a.m., the city said in a Facebook post earlier Tuesday.

City Hall and the public works department were both without phone and email service.

Almost 100 customers east of Baldwin City remained without power early Tuesday afternoon, and crews were working on the situation, according to the KCP&L online outage map. The map indicated that a handful of other customers, at about three isolated locations in other areas around the city, were also without power.

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