Geneva public works seeking cause of outage

GENEVA - Geneva public works employees are searching for the underlying cause of a power outage that left customers without electricity for about an hour and a half early Sunday morning.

Public works department phones were flooded with calls from chilly customers, said Mike Duffington, superintendent of electric services.

“If it wasn’t for the weather, it wasn’t that bad. But with the weather, we were very concerned for the customer.”

Duffington said he didn’t have an exact count of how many customers were affected. Clusters of homes as far north as South Street and as far south as Fabyan Boulevard, and as far east as Kirk Road and as far west as Western Avenue, were affected, he said.

Power went out around 6 a.m. and was restored by 8:43 a.m., Duffington said.

An underground cable near Western Avenue failed, and the system has been routed around the problem, Duffington said.

Crews still are trying to undestand why the cable failed.