Power back for Grand Haven Board of Light and Power customers

GRAND HAVEN, Mich. (WOOD) — The Grand Haven Board of Light and Power says it has restored power after an outage for essentially all of its customers.

BLP Operations and Power Supply Manager Erik Booth told News 8 that some 15,000 people were affected. He described the scope of the problem as a first for BLP.

“It’s been a really long time since we’ve experienced an outage of this magnitude,” Rob Shelley, general manager, said in a release. “The cause was a failure in a protective relay at one of our substations.”

The outage reported around 1:30 p.m. Monday, Booth said. Some customers started to get service back around 2:30 p.m. and Booth said everyone should have had service restored around 2:45 p.m.

“Engineers are performing a deep dive into what caused this transmission related outage and we will provide an update within the next couple of hours to let the community know what caused this,” BLP said in a post on Facebook .

Grand Haven Area Public Schools said Central High School, Lakeshore Middle School, White Pines Intermediate School, Ferry/Voyager Elementary, Mary A. White Elementary, Peach Plains Elementary and Griffin Elementary were affected by the outage. Citing the timing of the outage, the school district said on its website that busing and parent pickup would be the same as usual. Afterschool programs were scheduled to go on as usual after power was restored.

BLP also said that the outage was affecting its phone lines and website .

BLP covers Grand Haven, Ferrysburg and some surrounding areas.

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