Power flickering in des moines metro and surrounding areas

I have no good source for this except twitter link and I live in west des moines. Not too long ago the power started flickering at my house and i didn't think much of it at the time. Someone linked my wife to the des moines scanner group where many people observed a flash in the sky right before the flickering started.someone posted the dm pd stated it was a solar flare but that comment was removed. Many reports of an internet outage with centurylink (lumen) in the area. Another comment i saw was that a transformer in saylorville township caught fire which makes no sense given the size of the affected area. The affected area is dexter to newton, ames to indianola. That is probably a 75 to 100 square mile area if i were to hazard a guess. I saw nothing in suspicious observers app about geo storms and cannot find any other information. Anyone comes across a real explanation please let me know.

twitter link to scanner group

Use duckduckgo to view twitter without logging in if you dont know. The dsm scanner group facebook is private so i didnt link it.

As of now MidAmerican is saying it's 7 subscribers then 1 and 1 at the moment.

a reply to: ntech

No ones power went out entirely. Its just flickering. In all fairness there is also a ton of work being done around here on google fiber project. On my very street july 29th in the morning they struck a gas line. I could smell it all the way on the other side of the block and saw the fire department going door to door evacuating people. Its been an interesting summer.

How is it in the Quad Cities?

a reply to: drewlander
My guess would be since it was in the 80s with like 90% humidity the system has a lot of air conditioners running. A transformer probably popped under the strain and the system is shunting power around trying to keep things running. It doesn't look like a outage yet. But there could be a rolling brownout in the area. Just have to watch the morning news.

Quad Cities looks ok no outages. But the Outage at 22nd and Broadway is showing an equipment problem with 7 customers impacted. I would say someone ran over a power pole myself.

a reply to: musicismagic

Qc is about 220 miles away. Heard nothing. There is a state fair going on too. Not sure how man vendors tie into electricity at the fairgrounds versus generators.

a reply to: ntech

Second part of my last reply was meant to be directed at you. Though we are not california and have enough power to run AC, i must admit the state fair is going on. Also to be fair, between microsoft, facebook and amazon there has been like 6 data centers go up here in the last few years. But you see, where I became confused is that saylorville township is tiny and should not have any effect on the power in indianola. I have seen transformers light up the sky before but not cause interruptions over 50 miles away. Those events are more localized in my experience.

Okay so there has been no flickering for a while but one of the comments in the twitter feed is very interesting. power was flickering in newton but newton is on alliant, not mid american.

ETA: i also saw someone post they saw a turquoise flash in the sky west of 2nd ave and I80 which is the direction of saylorville lake, and the color of an exploding transformer.

Be on the lookout for mass poltergeists.

If you live with a crazy person, you can ignore this advice.

a reply to: jerich0

Option 2.

Found a news article on it. Leaves you with more questions than answers, as they state in yhe title Mid American answers the question while they simultaneously say they are unsure if any of the events are connected.

kcci story

a reply to: drewlander

Noted.

I'm guessing from the news report a transformer blew out and took down a feeder line with it. They're lucky there was enough redundancy in the system to get it back up and running.