For about an hour, thousands of customers in Sioux Falls were without electricity. Crews were able fix the problem that affected western parts of the city.

Steve Kolbeck who is Principal Manager of Xcel Energy said it was a simple problem. Essentially it was caused by something along the lines of happenstance

“The outage was due to debris that worked its way into the system. Fuses blew at a substation and once crews recognized what had happened, they reset the system. The entire response time and fix took a little more than an hour. It was nothing that was weather related, however something like this is pretty rare and fortunately we were able to fix it quickly. We’re very focused on safety, obviously. We think we responded in a timely manner as fast as we could and as safely as we could.”

The estimated number of homes and businesses that were affected was in the range of 13,000 customers. Sioux Falls Police tweeted at 6:48 AM that reports of traffic signals being affected west of Minnesota Avenue others in the area along Louise Avenue additionally reported being out of power which some had restored shortly after 7:30 AM Monday.


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