Two incidents cut power in Colleyville

A day with 82-degree weather normally would be good for an ice cream shop, but a power outage melted what chances Milwaukee Joe’s had for a good day.

Two separate incidents knocked electricity out of the businesses, residences and public buildings in The Village at Colleyville on March 31 for most of the day.

Milwaukee Joe’s owner Mike Perry and his wife spent the day in the ice cream store hoping they would not lose all their product.

Perry said they did not serve ice cream until power was restored to try and prevent the warm air from reaching the product. He said, overall, he lost business and there was some spoilage.

“We lost business, which cost us money, and we had some spoilage and a lot of anxiety,” he said. “It was really just a bad day.”

At about 9 a.m., a car hit a power pole on Bransford Road and killed power for 500 Oncor customers. Around the same time as the traffic accident, a contractor working on installing storm sewer lines on Pleasant Run Road cut an underground cable, which fried a service panel that had to be completely replaced.

While the first incident took about an hour for crews to restore power, resolving the Pleasant Run issue took until about 3 p.m. befire power came back to The Village.

Perry said once power was restored, there was a line of customers waiting for his ice cream.

Other stores in The Village, which houses about 39 businesses, had notes on their door saying that they closed their shops for the day.

City Hall and the Colleyville Public Library were in the dark, but municipal workers did as much work as possible, including taking water bill payments. Library staff moved children’s programming outdoors during the power outage and some library staff accepted book returns.

The Justice Center has a back-up generator, but City Hall does not.

This story was originally published April 7, 2015 at 9:37 AM with the headline "Two incidents cut power in Colleyville."