Many residents in Lyle, Rose Creek, Adams and Johnsburg were without power Wednesday night after a backup power feed faltered during scheduled repair work.

Freeborn-Mower Cooperative Director of Engineering and Operations Al Stadheim confirmed the outage started around 5 p.m. when a breaker failed on an alternate feed when the primary feed was down for extensive work taking place at the Adams substation.

Typically when such an issue happens, the cooperative can switch to the other feed, but that wasn’t possible with the repairs. Stadheim didn’t have the total number of customers effected; however, he noted it takes a good amount of time to fix such an issue.

“That does take a tremendous amount of time with the amount of members we had on that backup feed,” he said.

Power was restored to the last homes by around 11 p.m. Wednesday as Freeborn Mower worked with Alliant Energy, which supplies backup power, to resolve the situation, according to Stadheim.

With the repairs made Wednesday, Stadheim said there shouldn’t be any more issues with the alternate feed, which should be used until the scheduled repairs on the main feed are completed next Wednesday.

“We’ve made permanent repairs and we should be fine now until we get back on our normal feed,” he said.

Stadheim urged people to call Freeborn-Mower Cooperative at 800-734-6421 to report outages, as reports help them determine the scope and location of an outage.

“Always, always, always call when you are out of power,” he said. “Don’t assume the neighbor is [calling].”