KINGMAN – A power outage disrupted some government operations in downtown Kingman Tuesday. The Mohave County Courthouse, a number of county offices and Kingman City Hall lost power at 2:25 p.m.
The county administration facility was minimally impacted because Information Technology Director Nathan McDaniel said the phone and computer systems have backup power capability so employees can keep working during a service interruption.
Local Unisource Energy Electrical operations director Lynne Petersen said the outage impacted about 480 customers, but that most had service restored by shortly after 3:00 p.m. She said switching efforts by technicians helped bring most customers back online within 40 minutes.
“The system is designed to be able to do that, to direct electricity in multiple directions,” Petersen said. “You just have to go out and make some physical changes to the equipment and you can usually get most of the customers back up, which is exactly what happened this time.”
Petersen said all customers were returned to service by 4:30 p.m. She said the area of trouble was traced to the vicinity of Fifth and Maple Streets, where two phases, or wires came down.
The incident was not related to a traffic accident.
“I can tell you it’s definitely not that. At this point we don’t know what caused those two wires to come down,” she said. “If a car had hit a light pole, for example, we would know that, but our investigation has not made the cause obvious.”
Petersen said crews would continue to trouble shoot to identify the problem.
