OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – The idea of saving energy wasn’t just for homeowners on Mondays and Tuesdays. Companies that use a lot of electricity were asked to do the same.
For example, 6 News switched our transmitter for our tower here to generator power and none of us just left the forest.
The power problems quickly escalated. Yesterday, we received calls from Bellevue homeowners for the first time.
“I heard neighbor after neighbor went out of power,” said a Bellevue home owner.
Ten thousand customers lost power on Monday. On Tuesday, OPPD turned off more electricity to relieve pressure from a Texas-to-North Dakota grid ready to burst during a record-breaking cold.
Neighborhoods from Elkhorn to Pepperwood and 90th and Dodge saw their lights go out. The rolling blackout intentionally took out 72,000 total customers during different parts of the morning for a little over an hour each. The random outage even hit the home of Tim Burke, the head of the Omaha Public Power District.
“No preferential treatment there,” said OPPD spokesman Jodi Baker.
But as 6 News found, some neighborhoods lost power and others didn’t.
Why? The short answer is, it depends.
Those with OPPD and NPPD say they pay attention to critical areas where power is essential, such as schools, prisons, emergency centers, police stations, fire stations, nursing homes and hospitals. If you live near any of these places you may have taken a break.
While many of those examples have generators because they never know when a tornado or squirrel could damage a transformer, the decision makers are working to mitigate the impact.
“We are in a vague situation again,” said NPPD CEO Tom Kent.
With the possibility of more rolling blackouts ahead of Tuesday night and Wednesday, those running the energy companies understand the difficult position they are putting their customers.
‘There’s no way to say,’ Okay, we’ll interrupt at 8. “Think of it like a tornado or ice storm: this is an emergency, and when it happens, our operators take steps to ensure that system reliability doesn’t deteriorate to the point of an uncontrolled, widespread power outage,” said Kent.
6 The news was told that if there are more power outages on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, they will try to target neighborhoods that did not previously lose power – but there may be no way to lose your power again.
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