It now appears two separate power poles were involved in an extended outage situation near the Emporia Country Club on Thursday night.
Emporia Police Sgt. Lisa Sage says a non-injury crash led to the first outage when the driver of a westbound SUV on 18th missed the intersection at West Wilman Court when trying to turn south. The vehicle then hit a power pole, shutting down power to nearly 400 Westar Energy customers from the west side of the Country Club property west to Lincoln and south to 15th.
The driver’s name has not been released.
Westar crews restored power within about 30 minutes, but less than half an hour later utility lines caught fire about three poles away from the initial wreck and outage site. It took another hour or so for power to be restored after the fire developed. Again, close to 400 Westar customers lost power in the same general area of town.
