Winds cause damage to power lines east of Newton

A thunderstorm swept through Jasper County Monday afternoon causing damage to power lines causing thousands of area customers to be without power.

Straight-line winds clocked at 65 miles per hour caused more than seven power-line poles to break and land in a corn field east Newton along Highway 6. Those downed powerlines caused outages in several areas of Jasper County.

According to Alliant Energy spokesperson Mike Wagner, rural areas east of Newton were affected by the outages. The areas included Kellogg, Rock Creek, Oakland Acres, Killduff and parts of Grinnell. The outage began at 5:24 p.m. with 2,200 Alliant customers experiencing loss of service.

“Most of those were back on within two hours. During that time, there was also some other storm damage. 2,000 customers were back on around 7:24 p.m. We still had 200 customers out from all the poles that were down and another 250 customers that were out because of other storm related repairs,” Wagner said.

Almost all customers were back online by 11 p.m. with only nine customers without power Tuesday morning. This was because one power line received significant damage and had to be rebuilt. Alliant called in a crew from the Marshalltown area and anticipated power would be restored by Tuesday afternoon.

The poles belong to Alliant’s transmission partner ITC. Company spokesperson Rod Pritchard said there were nine poles that were damaged as a result of the storm. Electrical power was restored in a little more than an hour. Repairs to the poles are expected to be completed by Tuesday evening.

The storm also caused minor damage around the city, bringing trees and branches down. No significant damage has been reported.

Contact Pam Pratt at 641-792-3121 ext. 6530 or pampratt@newtondailynews.com