The Evanston Police Department and about 1,900 other city customers briefly lost power Wednesday when a truck hit a utility pole near the Chicago Transit Authority’s Main Street station.
But many in the power-zapped area, made up of the 18 square blocks bounded by Davis Street, Sherman and Maple avenues and Reba Place, were happily left out of the 35-minute outage.
Outages started at 11:40 a.m. when a truck hit a new utility pole at the corner of Main Street and Custer Avenue, causing existing wires to tangle, said Trent Frager, a spokesman for electric company Commonwealth Edison. ComEd serves the entire city of Evanston, as well as 3.6 million customers across northern Illinois.
At EPD’s offices, 1454 Elmwood Ave., the lights flickered twice, then went out amid groans from several officers working on computers.
But the critical areas of the police station — such as the 911 dispatch room — have emergency generators that work “instantaneously,” said Cmdr. Joseph Bellino of EPD.
Losing power is more of an inconvenience than a “critical loss” for the station, Bellino said, after opening his blinds to let sunlight stream into his dark office.
One possible inconvenience is that officers in the process of typing investigation reports may have to start from scratch, Bellino said.
“If they lost the document, it wouldn’t be any different than if somebody’s computer at home went down,” he said. But, Bellino added, “It doesn’t knock us out of the box.”
Although EPD had a few dark moments, many businesses and residences around the station had no idea there had even been a power problem.
Managers from Tommy Nevin’s Pub and Restaurant, 1450 Sherman Ave., and Bar Louie, 1520 Sherman Ave., said their restaurants had been bright as usual all day. Representatives at the nearby headquarters of Rotary International, 1560 Sherman Ave., said their building also was unaffected by the power outage.
Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th), who said the city usually notifies him about power outages in his ward, was surprised to learn of Wednesday’s incident.
“I haven’t heard a thing about it,” Bernstein said. “I’m between Sherman and Maple and Elmwood and our power did not go out today.”
He said his area has been “relatively unaffected” by past outages, which he said happen primarily in the southeast corner of the city.
The truck that caused the outages was a delivery semi truck, said two construction workers at the scene as they pointed to a slightly tilted brown pole.
But, the workers added, they did not know anything else about the accident.
“A truck going into the power line is something that you can’t blame the utility,” Bernstein said. “Hopefully no one was impacted in a terribly negative way and hopefully everybody’s back on.”
Reach Marissa Conrad at [email protected].
at Evanston Police Department, others, but causes little damage
