For the third day in a row the Manhattan area had power outage problems Tuesday morning.
The last case was reported at 4:09 Tuesday morning and lasted until 5:04 a.m. Much of east Manhattan was impacted, including the city’s water treatment plant . Westar Spokesman Shane Batchelder tells KMAN 975 customers were affected, and the cause of the outage was a bird in the substation.
Three outages were actually reported Sunday. One at 7:30 in the morning involved a bird and left 1,500 Manhattan Westar customers without power for a little more than an hour. In addition, a breaker was thrown at 3:30 Sunday afternoon, impacting 1,800 customers, with a simultaneous switch problem affecting another thousand customers near the K-State campus.
Monday 1,300 customers were without power for a half hour beginning at 10:15, due to a bird—and a tree falling on a line caused an outage to more than two-thousand customers at about 12:20 in the afternoon.
Batchelder was asked if it was unusual to have such problems three days in a row and he indicates it really isn’t –adding while it’s birds in Manhattan right now, Wichita has had problems with squirrels and Pittsburg has actually had issues with snakes in the past.