Underground Fire Causes Temporary Downtown Dallas Power Shutdown

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DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - For the third time in several weeks, a small fire in downtown Dallas caused power to be shutdown.

The Wednesday morning fire began in an underground vault of a building on Wood Street. Oncor Electric Delivery spokesperson Jamie Molina says they were forced to shut the power off between Young and Commerce so Oncor crews and firefighters could work safely.

"The downtown Dallas network has multiple redundancies that provide our customers with safe, reliable electric service," she said. "When the incident happened it did not actually cause outages because of the redundancies that we have in the system. We had to turn the power off for safety reasons."

All three of the recent fires happened rather close to each other in downtown Dallas, but Molina said there's no need for anyone to worry. "The events were completely unrelated and on different downtown electric networks."

Oncor had the power back on in the are within an hour.

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