Power in parts of Jackson to go off Sunday

Customers will be shooed out of Country Mart grocery store as 1 a.m. approaches Sunday morning. At Midwest Sterilization, the computers that operate fumigation chambers will be shut down and the employees will begin taking a long break. Employees also will power the computers down at the Rhodes 101 Stop in Jackson, lock the doors and begin waiting for the lights to come back on.

Power will be shut off to as many as half the customers in Jackson early Sunday morning while a 10-member city crew repairs a 34,500-volt transmission line at the intersection of Highways 25 and 34/72. Transmission lines are high-voltage power lines that carry electric power from electrical generation facilities to substations.

The outage will begin about 1 a.m. and is not expected to last more than an hour and a half. Primarily, only customers on the south and west sides of the city will be affected by the interruption in power. Those affected receive electricity from the western and industrial substations.

During the outage, the crew also will replace rotting poles and bad switches.This work will occupy most of the crew's time.

Jackson is one of the few cities in the region that operates its own electric utility. In Southeast Missouri, other communities that produce electricity are Sikeston, Poplar Bluff and Farmington.

If the transmission line was not isolated from the system, working on it would be extremely dangerous, says Don Schuette, the city's director of electric utilities.

Though some residents may have to reset clocks Sunday morning, businesses that operate 24 hours a day will be those most affected by the outage.

Other businesses that have been notified of the power interruption include Rubbermaid, Kasten Masonry Sales and Ceramo.

No pots

Stone Manes, secretary-treasurer at Ceramo, said the outage will occur at a time when production of ceramic pots at the plant is at its lowest level. The kiln won't be shut down, but the blowers and fans used in the kiln will not be operational. "We will not be able to fire pots during that period," Manes said.

The lost production could range from several hundred pots to several thousand, he said, depending on the size of the pots that would have been fired at the time.

Audrey Eldridge, president and owner of Midwest Sterilization, said the 10 or 12 employees who normally are working at that hour simply will take a break during the outage. But maintenance workers and information systems employees will be brought in to make sure critical equipment is shut down and brought back on line in good fashion. Two computers are required to run each of the company's sterilization chambers, and all are tied into a database network.

Jim Kincy, manager of Country Mart, says no temperature change will occur in his coolers or frozen food lockers during such a short outage. The coolers have handled a six-hour outage caused by a car accident, he said.

The store's compressor units will be shut down to prevent a power surge when they come back on after the outage.

Only emergency lights will be on in the store during that time. Once the outage is over, the store's halogen lights will require another 15 minutes to come on.

Echoing the other businesses managers, Kincy said the interruption is "not a major problem."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182