About 708 utility customers in Fulton were without power Tuesday - some for as long as five hours - due to a faulty underground power circuit at the Fulton State Hospital, city and state workers determined.
City Utilities Superintendent Darrell Dunlap said the outage began at approximately 8:30 a.m. from the area from south of the middle school to Bluff and St. Louis Avenue, and the east side of Business 54. He said the outage went unresolved for some customers because of the location and circumstances.
"That's what took us so long; there should have been some fuses on the State Hospital transformer that should have blown but didn't," said Dunlap. "Normally it's something obvious like a tree on the line or an insulator blown up, but this time the things that should have happened didn't happen, so it was hard to find."