Wyanet residents still waiting 
on Ameren

WYANET — When Ameren officials spoke at August’s Wyanet Village Board meeting, they assured residents that Ameren would have one of their engineers look into a 15-minute power outage that residents say damaged a host of personal property. Ameren officials said they would report back to the village board within a couple of week.

This comment came on the heels of several residents complaining to Ameren, demanding to know what Ameren is planning to do about their personal property that was damaged from a power surge on June 26 from about 9:30 to 9:45 a.m.

The missing 15 minutes is the time frame which several village residents lost personal property, ranging from TVs, freezers, laptops and even a hot tub.

During the August meeting, Hans Hoelzel, a construction supervisor from Ameren, gave residents a timeline which he received from Ameren’s dispatch in Peoria. According to the timeline, dispatch received a call that at 3:19 a.m. on June 26, a high side fuse at Buda’s substation was found to be not working, causing power outages throughout the area. Following protocol, a special crew was dispatched to take care of the problem.

At 8:41 a.m., power was restored, but at that time, Ameren realized that Phase B was not working. While sub crews were out fixing this problem, troubleshooters were out throughout the area, checking to make sure that everything else was working properly before any type of power could be restored.

Once the sub crew was given the all clear signal, power was restored completely at 11:02 a.m. According to Hoelzel, there was no mention or recording of the 15 minutes where Wyanet residents had their problems.

Three weeks have passed since residents made their concerns known to Ameren.

Wyanet Mayor Bruce Hand said he spoke to Ameren and was told, “Ameren has nothing to report at this time; they are waiting on the engineer to review the issue. Once the engineer has drawn a conclusion, they (Ameren) will be calling me to set up a time; they are looking at another week, possibly two.”

On Wednesday, Ameren called Hand and told him they will not be in attendance at Wyanet’s village board meeting on Tuesday. Instead, Ameren told Hand they will need to wait until the board meeting on Oct. 12.