Thursday outage not tied to weather, ComEd says

David Mendell, Staff Writer, Chicago Tribune, June 10, 2000

In one way, the power outage that struck the near western suburbs Thursday evening indeed is a sign of things to come, but in a larger sense, it isn't, Commonwealth Edison officials insisted Friday.

Electrical power went down for about four hours, beginning about 6:40 p.m., after a switch malfunctioned in a transmission distribution center in Oak Park.

ComEd officials stressed the problem did not result from a system overloaded by hot weather, even though temperatures topped 90 degrees Thursday for the first time this year.

ComEd likened the failure to a circuit breaker snapping off in one's home. The malfunction darkened about 24,000 ComEd customers in parts of Oak Park, River Forest, Berwyn, River Grove and Leyden Township.

Officials explained that occasional power glitches, such as Thursday's, are impossible to prevent in an aging power system as vast as the one feeding metropolitan Chicago.

ComEd continued to forecast minimal heat-related failures this summer.

Extended heat-induced outages in the summer of 1999 left homes and businesses without electricity for up to four days, filling neighborhood cooling centers and costing businesses millions of dollars in revenue.

ComEd officials insisted on Friday that they have made wide spread and expensive improvements to the area's network that should reduce heat-related incidents drastically this year.

"We've boasted enough that if we don't perform, you are going to be pillorying us, and rightly so," said Don Kirchoffner, ComEd spokesman.

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