A 30-foot box truck took down power lines running across Puckety Church Road in Lower Burrell on Thursday afternoon, breaking two utility poles, igniting a transformer fire and knocking out power to about 3,500 customers.
Lower Burrell Volunteer Fire Company No. 3 responded about 2:40 p.m. and put out the fire.
But the driver of the Friendly Movers truck was told to stay inside the vehicle because of the danger posed by the downed power lines. He ended up driving away about 3:35 p.m. He had been moving items from a neighboring house when the truck struck the wires.
Power was restored to 2,000 homes by about 5 p.m., according to West Penn Power spokesman Todd Meyers. By 9:45 p.m., the number of outages was fewer than 100.
“We wouldn’t have had any of this if we hadn’t had the moving van caught in the wires and taking down the poles and the wires,” Meyers said. “The main line there has different wires that serve a lot of customers.”
The accident knocked out power at the Shaffers Corner substation.
“You can roll up some pretty big numbers pretty quickly even with something that’s as localized as wires coming down because of a car/pole accident,” Meyers said.
