Equipment Failure Sparked Power Outage In Strongsville

STRONGSVILLE, OH — Chunks of the Strongsville community suddenly lost power late Monday night. The outage, which started around 10:15 p.m., only lasted about 20 minutes, but sparked concern and questions among Patch readers.

On Tuesday morning, Chris Eck, a FirstEnergy spokesperson, said the outage was caused by a switch failure at a substation. Crews were doing work at the substation at the time and were able to quickly replace the failed switch. The outage only lasted about 20 minutes.

Patch readers from Settlers Village and Waterford Crossing reported losing power on Monday evening. Eck said the switch failure impacted about 3,000 customers around the region.

Once crews realized the switch was damaged they isolated that power line and shut it off, leading to the brief power outage. Crews then replaced the damaged equipment and rebooted the power.

"Think of it as a traffic signal on a major roadway," Eck said. "The signal broke and traffic backed up. Once we replaced the signal, everything could move freely again."