How much damage can a milar balloon cause if caught up in a power line? A lot!
About 3 o-clock this afternoon a milar balloon got caught in some power lines on Kingston Road that carry 34-thousand volts of electricity – and a near-by power station on Williamson Way was knocked out as a result of it. Traffic lights in much of Southern Hills went out, and an estimated 7-thousand homes and businesses lost power, resulting in many stores and restaurants without generator back-up having to close down.
The outage is believed to have been so widespread because after this happened, SWEPCO workers tried to re-route some of the lines to a Wallace Lake Road sub-station, but that one got overloaded and went out. By about seven o'clock the outage was down to less than half of the customers originally affected – or around 33-hundred southwest shreveport customers. 
Be sure to wake up with News Day AM beginning at 5:30 a.m. Thursday for the very latest on this major power outage.

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