Lightning causes power outages

Plymouth Utilities reported some scattered and significant power outages from the powerful thunderstorms that moved through Plymouth and Sheboygan County Wednesday.

One of the more significant outages occurred at 6:41 p.m. when a lightning strike damaged an underground power cable in the 300 block of North Highland Avenue in Plymouth. The outage affected around 300 customers in the area north of Eastern Avenue, including Highland Avenue, Bishop Avenue, Kensington Avenue and Douglas Drive.

This outage also affected one of the city’s sewage lift stations located along Highland Avenue, but did not cause any sewage-related problems.

Electric personnel patrolled the lines and eventually found that a section of underground cable had failed. The crew was able to isolate the failed cable and restored power to a majority of those customers (including the lift station) by 9 p.m. Work continued and power was restored to residents in the Salem Green apartments by 10 p.m.

Another significant outage occurred around 6:49 p.m. on a distribution circuit when its breaker tripped out at Substation No. 4. The nearly four-hour long outage affected about 500 customers north of Johnsonville, including Lakeland College and the communities of Franklin and Ada.

Crews patrolled the lines and found that lightning had struck and damaged the overhead system on County M just south of County J. Electric personnel made repairs and were able to re-energize the circuit at 10:39 p.m.

The last customer to have power restored was Johnsonville Sausage’s Riverside plant. The storm caused some damage to Johnsonville’s own electrical equipment. The company made repairs and the utility restored power to the plant around 11 p.m.