The severe weather thunderstorms that blew through yesterday morning in Ottawa caused a wide spread power outage on the south end of town. Ottawa Utilities Director, Dennis Tharp, says the culprit behind the outage was simple. A large tree at 9th and Poplar blew over and landed on some important power lines and knocked out Circuit Two. That put most of the south end without power. The outage lasted right on an hour, closing several businesses on the south end, including KOFO. We were off the air for that time. Tharp says he is thankful the fix was an easy one. It just took crews a little extra time as they had to cut away the tree, then complete repairs on the circuit box and the power lines before electricity was able to be restored.
