It’s been a rough year to be a City of Winfield power pole.
Straight-line winds that swept through the Winfield area Saturday night snapped transmission poles south of the city, leaving approximately 4,500 electric customers without power, according to City Manager Taggart Wall.
The storm caused extensive damage to the city’s electric transmission system between 202nd Road and 212th Road, where 11 transmission poles and one distribution pole were broken. Wall said only small, isolated issues were reported elsewhere in the system.
The outage affected customers throughout Winfield as well as the city’s electric service territories in Burden and Dexter.
“The storm caused several circuits to open in the remaining system,” Wall said.
Because such a large section of the system could not be restored automatically through system controls, electric crews had to physically patrol transmission and distribution circuits to locate faults before restoring service.
“Crews must drive the circuits to determine the fault and restore power safely to protect customer property as well as substation equipment,” Wall said. “This process takes time.”
Some customers began getting electricity back about two hours after the outage began. By around the three-hour mark, all but about 100 customers had service restored. As of Sunday morning, one customer near 202nd Road remained without power while crews continued repair work.
Wall said employees returned Sunday morning to assess the damage and begin rebuilding the damaged transmission system.
“We truly appreciate all responding employees who sacrificed time with their families to serve our community on the 4th of July,” he said.
The latest storm comes less than two months after a mid-May severe weather event that broke 19 transmission poles along Country Club Road in Winfield. City officials previously estimated damage from that storm at more than $200,000. Continue below ad.
With Saturday night’s storm destroying another 11 transmission poles and one distribution pole, the city has now lost 30 transmission poles and one distribution pole to severe weather this year.
Winfield is one of the few cities in Kansas that owns and operates its own electric production, transmission and distribution systems, making damage to transmission infrastructure especially significant.
The storms are part of an unusually active severe weather season across Kansas. According to the National Weather Service office in Wichita, National Weather Service offices across the state issued 1,429 warnings through the end of June — the second-highest total through June since records began in 1986.
