Power surge causes minor problem for county

Meadville Tribune, The Meadville Tribune, Pa.
·1 min read

Mar. 6—An electricity surge in Meadville on Tuesday morning caused a minor problem for the Crawford County Department of Public Safety.

The power surge around 11 disrupted the county's fire central dispatch channel, but a redundant backup system came on, Greg Beveridge, the department's director, said Tuesday afternoon. He said there was no loss in dispatching capabilities by the county.

Beveridge said the surge apparently was due to a planned outage on Radio Tower Hill in Vernon Township by Penelec. However, Beveridge said he had not been advised of the outage.

The surge caused one of the county's multiple channel emergency communications to malfunction.

"For whatever reason it caused the receiver to lose its memory (for the fire central channel) and not work," Beveridge said. "Only fire central was impacted."

The receiver itself wasn't physically damaged, but the fire central channel had to be reset by technicians from Mobil Communications Service (Mobilcom) of Meadville, he said.