City: Balloon knocked out power

An aluminum balloon that escaped from a birthday party began what evolved into hours of power outages for a portion of Morgan City.
City Utilities Director Bill Cefalu said the balloon got away from a party on Fifth Street and led to an outage that began at 7:15 p.m. when the city’s Uptown Feeder failed. That powers an area that includes Myrtle Street to Railroad Avenue and Brashear Avenue to the Atchafalaya River.
“That started it all,” Cefalu said of the balloon, “and after that it was a bunch of other issues we ran into because the breaker wouldn’t come back on.”
He pleaded with residents not to use aluminum balloons in their celebrations because they conduct electricity.
In fixing the issue, Cefalu said the city isolated some areas of the power grid and restored power to about 60% of those out within a few hours. For the other section of power offline, an IT worker was brought in to work on the system. Power was restored to everyone by 11:35 p.m.
Cefalu said that work to upgrade the utility system will be done this week. While the city will try to keep from turning off the power, there may be some outages.