By By JAN GRIFFEY / Niles Daily Star
NILES – Most of the City of Niles was without power Wednesday night and into Thursday morning.
Apparently the city utilities, which purchases its power from American Electric Power, lost its feed of power from AEP, though that hasn't been confirmed, said Jim Lehmkuhl, manager of the city's utilities department.
At about 9:45 p.m., the city lost its feed of power to five of its seven substations.
The city's west side substation, which serves much but not all of the city's west side, did not lose power. Neither did the substation feeding much of the city's industrial park lose power, which also serves customers from the industrial park area going west over toward M-51.
Power was restored just after midnight.
"We do not know what happened, but we have our suspicions," Lehmkuhl said. "We wonder if we lost the AEP feed to the south side of the city. We've got to get verification from them on that, but the entire station on the south side where we take feed from AEP was down.
"We're doing a lot of patrolling this morning, trying to find a problem, but haven't found anything yet," he said.
"Last night, we began bringing each of the stations back on line one by one, and they held. Now that it's daylight, we have crews out in the field doing as much checking as we can."
Lehmkuhl said Lakeland Hospital Niles, though located on the city's west side, was without power. City crews worked to bring it back on line quickly.
"As the day goes on, we may find out something more, but that's all we know right now," he said.
Niles Fire Chief Larry Lamb said one manufacturer in Niles' industrial park did have a power outage, which he thinks led to a fire at that plant at about midnight.
The city's fire department was called out to TemPace in the Niles Industrial Park for a fire in a room in which an oven used to temper glass is located. Lamb said he thinks the fire was started when the power was restored to the hot oven.
"Basically, one room had foam insulation on its walls and was gutted. There may be some electrical damage as well. We will know more when we go out there to investigate this morning," Lamb said. "For a factory, the damage was relatively minor."
Lamb said most of the work his crew did during the power outage was preventative in nature.
"We keep lists of people with special needs – like on ventilators and that sort of thing – and sent the police department, our fire guys and SMCAS (Southwestern Michigan Community Ambulance Service) to check on them as well as to all the high rises, the hospital, hotels and all the nursing homes," he said. "We had some issues with emergency lighting in some areas, but the fire marshal knows about that now. It was a good time to check that."
Lamb commended Randy Stevens of the Niles Utilities and his crew, who he said, "did an awesome job clearing the power outage."