Power zapped for nearly 600 KCP&L customers in Northland - KCTV5
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Losing power is bad on any day, but even worse when it is well over 100 degrees.
The outage Tuesday was relatively short-lived, but that was no consolation to many Northland business owners who say they have been dealing with service problems for years.
The power is back up and running now, but some of the machines, including the ice maker at Smoke Box BBQ in the Tiffany Landing shopping center, are still off-line.
"I'm very frustrated. When you have a line of people out the door during lunch hour, and half your equipment is off, and you have to write down credit card numbers, it is very frustrating," owner of Smoke Box BBQ Michael Occhipinto said.
Occhipinto was one of about 546 customers who lost power for about 90 minutes after KCP&L says a key piece of equipment burned up in the heat.
But Occhipinto says he has been dealing with power outages and service interruptions for 18 years, and it is hurting his bottom line.
"One evening we had to shut down, several evenings. You can't operate if you don't have any power ... coolers shut down," he said.
Frustration levels are just as high at the dry cleaner next door, which has already lost business to missed deadlines.
"You lose a customer, you probably won't get him back. That one customer could be your biggest client," The Dry Cleaner owner, Jin Kim, said.
But KCP&L is urging patience. They say they bought the system that was affected Tuesday from another company in 2008. Since then, they say they have invested heavily in upgrades.
"We have spent over $6 million on the area that was impacted today. We have done 500 different types of repairs to the system to try and make reliability better," said Chuck Caisley with KCP&L.
KCP&L will be the first to admit they still have a lot of work to do on that system, but they are vowing to keep improving service to the area.
Copyright 2012 KCTV (Meredith Corp.) All rights reserved.
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