Kingfisher Electric Department workers didn’t get much sleep Thursday night and neither did Kingfisher, Dover, Okarche and some Hennessey residents without air conditioners or electric fans.

Faults in the OG&E transmission system at substations near Okarche and south of Hennessey turned Okarche and Dover dark and caused frustrating brown outs and outages in Kingfisher that lasted most of the night.

The private utility is the electric provider for Okarche and Dover, where it also owns the transmission lines.

Kingfisher owns its own lines within the city limits and purchases power through the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority, but OMPA relies on OG&E for transmission of electricity to the city’s system.

That means OG&E’s problems can become Kingfisher’s problems, with the city’s electric department having little to no control over how or when those problems are resolved, City Manager Dave Slezickey said.

“We lost a phase or leg of incoming feed after 10 p.m., which caused some customers to have power, others to be out and some to have low power,” Slezickey said. “Full power was lost as OG&E shut the line down after 11 p.m. to work repairs.”

While the city has its own power plant and generating capacity, switching to local power is a little more involved than just pulling a lever.

“When we isolate (from outside transmission) we request permission from OMPA to leave the OG&E feed and transition to internal generation,” Slezickey said Friday.

“Normally, when they have identified an issue that will take longer than two hours to repair, we are able to fire up the power plant and generate.

“Our seven-hour outage last night was not a normal issue.”

Slezickey said the city’s electric department was “ramped up and ready” to start local generation three different times during the extended outage.

“Prior to ‘switching in,’ we were advised to standby from OMPA operations, who were communicating with OG&E operations, informing us that OG&E would be swithcing us back in shortly,” he said.

“There are multiple levels of communications and ‘shortly turned into almost an hour.

“Finally, at 4:30 a.m. (electric superintendent) Mark Gambill and I called OMPA and advised them that we had to get power back on in our community and to do what they needed to do to let us generate.”

But just as last steps were taken to allow the local plant to “switch in” (including a trip by Gambill to the Bowman substation to make sure relevant breakers were opened or closed) the lights started coming back on, Slezickey said.

“We got calls from OMPA that they were showing transmision restoration,” he said. “We started powering the plant down and left about 5 a.m., worn out, frustrated and confused,” Slezickey said.

Local residents facing potentially electronics-frying brownouts followed by a total loss of power, as promised deadlines on OG&E’s website for when power would be restored came and went also expressed frustration on the city’s Facebook page.

One resident who said she was suffering from double pneumonia and on home oxygen wrote that she drove to a Guthrie hotel in the middle of the night with her three children, one of whom has special needs.

Slezickey, who said he hadn’t had time to read all the social media comments, urged anyone with a life-threatening condition requiring electricity to have a generator or other contingency plan.

“Regardless of where they live in the U.S., anything from severe weather events and blackouts to planned system maintenance for distribution, transmission and generation, can cause a loss of electric service,” he said.