City of Russell Experiences Citywide Power Outage

The City of Russell experienced a citywide power outage late Monday morning.

According to City of Russell officials, the City was disconnected from the electric grid since 9 AM Monday morning to allow Sunflower Electric to perform maintenance. The City was generating its own power because of that.

At around 11:30 AM Monday, there was a fuel issue on one of the generators that tripped the generator and caused a cascading of all other generators to trip off. Crews then began the process of restarting the power plants.

All power was restored by around 12:30 PM Monday.

City Manager Jon Quinday released the following press release Monday afternoon:

The city was operating the turbine and downtown power plant at 9 AM today to generate the city's power so Sunflower Electric could work on their equipment. Sunflower Electric is the transmission operator where the city connects to the electric grid and Sunflower's work required the city to disconnect from the grid.

At 11:24 AM, an issue with one of the downtown generators caused a significant load on the turbines, resulting in all protective relays to dump generation and city circuits and the power outage. Electric production crews quickly worked to restart the turbine plant to restore power. Circuits came back on beginning at 11:58 AM with all circuits back on by 12:20 PM.

Sunflower completed their work and the city reconnected to the grid at 2:46 PM and began taking internal generation offline.

Thank you to our customers for their patience and understanding as crews worked to restore power safely.

(Information courtesy City of Russell.)