By Louis Hoglund
Moms dined in the dark for Mother's Day dinner, due to a power outage in Perham late Sunday afternoon, May 13.
Meanwhile, customers and employees at both Perham grocery stores were caught in the dark during the outage, which shot down power for most of southeast Perham.
A burned out terminator switch is blamed for the outage, which shut down some customers for more than an hour. The outage affected about 510 customers in southeast Perham.
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Mother's Day dinner patrons at Perham's Station House restaurant were in the dark, until power in most of the outage area was restored at 6 p.m. Fortunately, the kitchen crew could prepare meals on the gas-powered stove--but hot coffee and soda pop were unavailable because there was no electricity.
About 254 connections were down for 33 minutes. Another 255 customers were out of power for one hour, 15 minutes, according to Otter Tail Power's area engineer Wayne Mueller.
The incident was not weather related, noted Otter Tail's Perham customer service representative Todd Barney.
"It was a mechanical failure," said Barney. "That circuit carries quite a bit of load...and the switch was installed there in about 1994."
The signal light at the downtown intersection was not working, but the railroad crossing signal continued to work as it was not connected to the source of the outage.
Both Dean's Country Market and Service Foods were shut down. Main Street Express convenience also lost power.
Service Foods closed at about 6 p.m. for the evening, though normal closing is at 10 p.m.
Service has a back-up battery, which enables the cash register lanes to operate for about a half-hour, according to manager Dave Still. But after about 20 minutes--and not knowing when power would be restored--Still made the decision to close.
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Dean's was out of commission for about an hour, but reopened for the evening at about 6 p.m., according to manager Greg Keil.
Overall, customers were understanding, noted Barney.
"I think most of them were pretty happy we got power back on as quick as we did," said Barney.
A planned and announced shut down may be necessary in the near future in order to make final repairs, said Barney. It is expected to affect only two businesses, Main Street Express and the Nelson's Confectionary candy manufacturing plant. Moms dined in the dark for Mother's Day dinner, due to a power outage in Perham la
