Commonwealth Edison is reporting at least a dozen scattered power outages around Evanston this evening.
The largest reported outage affects more than 1,000 customers in the area around Nichols Middle School in central Evanston. Another affects about 536 customers in downtown Evanston in the vicinity of Chicago Avenue and Church Street.
But there are additional outages — about five in north Evanston, each affecting dozens of customers — as well as several more in south Evanston.
You can check on outage reports and scheduled power restoration times on the ComEd website.
Northwestern University police reported that there was a power outage affecting portions of the Evanston campus earlier this evening, but that power had been restored to the campu by shortly after 8 p.m.
Strange electrical service before outage
The transformer for our block blew with a big bang at 3 a.m., and now the entire block is out. When I compared notes with my neighbors this morning, they had experienced the same issues we had yesterday evening before the power went out: all three households had partial outages before the transformer finally blew. We all had some circuits that were working and some that were not. The strangest phenomenon at our house was a couple of lighbulbs glowing very dimly. Resetting circuit breakers did nothing to fix the problem. Two of our houses are very old, but the third one is quite new and has modern wiring.
Word to the wise: if your electrical service starts acting strangely it might not be your wiring. It just might be ComEd.
Power out at Target
This morning at 8 a.m., the power was out at Target on Howard Street. The store opened anyway, with dim lighting, but the registers were definitely working.
ComEd amazed me
My power went out at 5:30 last night and I panicked because I figured on a holiday with crews work non-stop in the Western Suburbs that my power wasn't coming on anytime soon. An hour later, it was back. There were a couple more shorter outages but by 9 the power was back on for good. In the hottest day ever, they kept it going. I am grateful, and impressed.