Thursday, October 18, 2012 2:33 pm

More than 7,000 MTEMC members lost power for as much as three hours and 15 minutes following an equipment failure at the substation feeding most of Cannon County.

The outage started at about 6 p.m., affecting the majority of the county. MTEMC crews and technicians were able to restore power to some members over the course of the outage, which ended at approximately 9:17 p.m.

"We are sorry for the inconvenience to our members," MTEMC VP of Communications Chris Jones said. "MTEMC employees worked hard to restore power as quickly and safely as possible. We will be investigating the causes of the equipment failure over the next few days."

"The technical explanation is that there was a differential issue that locked out the station, but it’s still what we know to be a mechanical failure that occurred in the substation," said Todd Palmer of MTEMC."

"It was just one of those unforeseen circumstances where some equipment malfunctioned and caused the problem. Mechanical failures are an unfortunate reality of technology," Palmer said.