Around midnight on Sunday, area residents as far-spread as Irma and Gleason, found themselves suddenly without power. Within minutes, local social media pages were buzzing with stunned residents and soon, frustrated residents. Some local Wisconsin Public Service customers in the outage area were unable to obtain any answers from the company upon reporting the outage. As of Monday morning, many were still without answers.
“I called in at exactly midnight,” states Katrina Woller, who lives near the intersection of CTH G and C in the town of Schley. “I was only able to get an automated system to report an outage. No matter what I did I also could not get a live person. I fought with the automated system for about 15 minutes before I gave up and hoped for the best.”
According to Kelly Zagrzebski, WPS Community Relations Representative in Wausau, the outage was caused by a blown switch in the Merrill area, affecting 4,000 customers. Zagrzebski stated the outage occurred at 12:12 a.m. and was restored by 3:12 a.m. on Monday morning.
Zagrzebski states in most cases a cause is not given to customers as the cause is often unknown. “We don’t always know what caused an outage, we only know how to fix it. When we are able to locate the problem, we then update our automated system with updated information such as a restore time, if one is available.”
Zagrzebski further adds the company’s automated phone system is an option versus speaking with a live person, as there may not be enough live representatives available to speak to customers.
“It really depends on when they call during an outage”.