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The town of Peabody and residents in surrounding areas lost power overnight after failing equipment sparked a fire in an energy substation, a Westar Energy spokeswoman said Thursday afternoon.
About 914 households were affected by the nine-hour outage, which started around 9 p.m. Wednesday, spokeswoman Erin La Row said. Equipment in the Peabody substation failed, causing a fire that led to the outage. The cause of the equipment failure is still unknown, she said.
Power in the area was restored by 6 a.m. Thursday, La Row said. Residents in rural Peabody and the city of Burns were also affected. Peabody is located northeast of Wichita in Marion County.
The outage comes on the heels of several triple-digit days, leaving many residents concerned their air conditioning would not work during Thursday’s heat.
“We were all a little worried last night,” Shane Marler, a spokesman for the city of Peabody, said Thursday afternoon. “But the crisis is over.”
It’s not common for fires to start in the substations, La Row said, but it does happen on occasion. Weather does not appear to have played a factor, she added.
