If you went without power Sunday morning, you weren’t alone. Met-Ed says a peak of 8,000 customers lost power Sunday morning due to a transmission line issue near the Expo Center.
Met-Ed has approximately 59,000 customers in Lebanon County were affected, or about 14% of customers.
The outage affected residents in South Lebanon and North Cornwall townships. It began Sunday morning around 6:40am when a wooden cross on a 69,000-volt transmission line broke behind the Expo Hall at the Lebanon County Fairgrounds.
The transmission line failure was compounded by an equipment malfunction at a Met-Ed substation near Broad Street. This failure affected three other nearby substations, with about 2,000 customers affected through each of the four total substations.
Power was restored to everyone by noon, but half of affected customers had power restored by 8am and another 2,000 were restored mid-morning.
Met-Ed spokesperson Todd Meyers said that it wasn’t 100% certain what caused the wooden cross to fall, but wind over the previous days and weeks was the likely cause.
Met-Ed is one of several companies operated by First Energy in Pennsylvania.