PIERRE, S.D. (KCCR) – The Pierre City Commission was updated this week on a power outage last week that caused around 3,000 people to go without power for up to two hours. City Utilities Director Brad Palmer says a major equipment failure caused the outage.

The Evans Street substation is offline for major upgrade work. Palmer says most customers were back on within an hour of the outage taking place. Other had service return in the hour after that.  Some large customers were impacted.

Palmer says the Ash station was recently upgraded…except for the transformers.

Test results on oil inside the transformer were expected back yesterday. If the city needs to replace the unit it could take up a year to build as transformers that size are custom built for their specific application.