Nearly 600 customers were without power in the Pottsville area for a few hours Sunday afternoon.
Emergency crews had to direct traffic at the busy Route 61 and Mill Creek intersection when the outage affected the traffic lights.
Melinda Stumpf, a spokeswoman for PPL Electric Utilities Corp., said 598 customers lost power at 12:34 p.m. Sunday in East Norwegian Township. Customers included the Fairlane Village mall, Weis Markets and other businesses, including the Wine and Spirits Shoppe, in the area once called the Pottsville Park Plaza. It is the only state Wine and Spirits outlet in the county that is open on Sundays. A woman there said the store was able to accept cash only for items due to the outage.
"By 1:57 p.m., we had more than half of the customers back," Stumpf said Sunday. "We had the rest back by 3:41 p.m."
"The cause was an intermittent fault, which could have been a tree limb, an animal or something that locked up the lines," Stumpf said.
A person who answered the phone at Weis Markets was unable to comment without corporate approval.
It was the second outage in the Pottsville area in less than a week.
Eighteen customers in Pottsville went without power Wednesday night into Thursday morning after a transformer failure.
The transformer in the 100 block of West Market Street failed at 6:41 p.m. Wednesday. A temporary one was put up in the middle of the street to restore power at 9:21 a.m. Thursday. The temporary transformer was still there as of Sunday night.