By Bonnie Culverhouse
City officials are unsure why a Sunday evening storm knocked out power city-wide for a short time.
Minden Mayor Nick Cox said the wind was bad enough to take down trees, limbs and send other debris flying, and that may have been the culprit.
“Or it could’ve been lightning that tripped the main feed,” Cox said.
“There were four or five trees down that took out some power lines – a couple landed on cars but there was no one in them,” said Public Works Director Tyler Wallace. “We got the city back on, then we had to chase the little switches and breakers.”
Cox said the switches “came open” in neighborhoods all across the town.
“Nobody was expecting it; it just blew up from the east,” Cox said. “It threw everything off.”
City workers from surrounding towns and communities told Wallace they didn’t have a drop of rain, while Minden was inundated.
“They had no idea why they were being called in to work,” Wallace said.
A second storm, rolling through around 8:30 p.m. Monday, caused a more condensed area of outage. Some residences tied to the Germantown substation had issues due to a problem with a transformer. Power was restored in around 45 minutes.
