Community Corner

Panera Among 75 PPL Customers In Lower Mac Without Power

A spokesperson for PPL Electric said, on Wednesday morning, that the cause of a power outage that began Tuesday still has not been located.

There is no definitive answer on when Panera Bread and the other PPL customers still without power in Lower Macungie Township will get their electricity back, according to a PPL spokesperson who talked to Patch on Wednesday morning.

Joe Nixon, of PPL, explains that the 75 customers still without electricity Wednesday are a handful of the 1900 customers in Lower and Upper Macungie townships who lost power Tuesday at about 5 p.m. The customers now affected are located in an area north of the intersection of Hamilton Boulevard and Route 100 and constitute a mix of residential and commercial customers, he says.

“Crews have been working since late yesterday afternoon,” Nixon says, “andy they’ve continued working through the night. They’ve visually inspected the line and are trying to locate the source of the problem, which is not visually apparent.

Find out what's happening in Lower Macungiewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“The problem could be on the main line, or it could be on a line that feeds off the main line. It’s just a process by which they methodically have to go through,” he says.

PPL was able to bring back the majority of customers impacted by the outage through internal “switching to isolate the problem area to the smallest possible size,” Nixon says. Basically, this means the company works to feed the customers electricity from an alternate route.

Find out what's happening in Lower Macungiewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

For the remaining 75 customers without power, unfortunately, there is no definitive word on how long the outage will last, Nixon says.

“At this point the cause of the problem is eluding us,” he says. “We are working hard to find the problem and fix it. Since we are still trying to investigate it, right now there is no firm estimate on when power will be back.

“The thing I would just say is we are working as hard as we can to find the source of the problem and once we do, we will be able to provide a more accurate estimate of when we will be able bring power back on,” Nixon says.


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