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You've heard us report in the past few weeks of power outages in Hannibal.

In fact, we got a viewer e-mail early this morning concerned about the outages.

We dug a little deeper and found out there have been six power outages that lasted longer than a half an hour in the past four weeks.

KHQA took the viewer's concerns straight to the man in charge for this KHQA Fact Finder report.

To hear the Indian Mounds substation buzzing is probably annoying if you live near it. But when it's buzzing, that's a good thing because it's working. And in the past month, there have been four power outages here. Three of those were caused by lightning arresters. That's a piece of equipment that takes lightning strikes and grounds them, so that energy doesn't enter the system.

"After so many hits on these lightning arresters, they become weakened. Eventually they give up and fail," says Don Willis, the General Manager of the Board of Public Works in Hannibal.

When a lightning arrester fails, it explodes and drops a wire. When that happens, there's an outage. Just to put it into perspective, the city of Hannibal normally has three or four failures in the entire city in a year. This substation has had three in the last four weeks.

Why is this not fixed?

"To fix that, you have to take them out of service. To take them out of service means you have to take the whole thing out of service so you can work on it," says Willis.

And in the summer, it's too hot to pull a substation because usage is too high. The other problem is money. Upgrading the 45 year old substation has been in the five year plan, and the annual budget the last three years. But every year it gets pulled out of the budget. Last year, you'll remember the city got an unexpected $400,000 bill from Ameren it had to pay. That scrapped the plan last year. This year, Willis wanted to raise rates three percent.

"That 3% increase would've paid for this job. Everybody said we don't want that rate increase, so we cut the rate increase which means we cut the budget which means we don't have the money for that project," says Willis.

Willis also says the project has already been cut from this year's fiscal budget which just began July first. That means the 2400 customers affected by the substation will have to spend at least the next eleven months wondering when the next power outage will hit.

Willis says he knows people get angry when the power goes out, and they want the problem fixed.

He says he wants it fixed too.

Every time the power goes out, he's faced with the possibility of paying his employees overtime, and that just takes more money out of the budget.

He does say crews do maintenance and temporary fixes on the Indian Mounds substation, but the problem won't be fully fixed until there's money to upgrade.