Power outages plague areas of southeast Iowa City Saturday

Lang
6/17/23

A pair of power outages left thousands of Iowa City residents without electricity for much of Saturday.

Online police records indicate a transformer blew near the intersection of Sycamore Street and Langenberg Avenue just after 6:30 Saturday morning, knocking out power to traffic lights and hundreds of residences in the area. Power was restored to many areas of southeast Iowa City by 8:30am, but neighborhoods around Alexander Elementary School remained without power for several hours longer.

A fleet of MidAmerican Energy trucks was seen working on power poles along Sycamore for much of the day Saturday. The remaining 247 residences affected had power restored just after 6pm.

Emails sent to MidAmerican customers said the problem was, in their words, “an animal contact with electric facilities”.