The outage appears to be regional, with 1,569 PPL Electric Utilities customers initially in the dark in Lower Saucon Township.
A malfunction heating unit drew an emergency response this morning to the Lehigh Valley Children's Center at 729 Delaware Ave. in Fountain Hill, but it was a power outage in the area that presented the possibility of an evacuation, according to a Lehigh County dispatch supervisor.
Rescuers were also dispatched to the parking garage at St. Luke's University Hospital for people who were stuck in an elevator when the lights went out, but it was quickly resolved as power came back, emergency dispatches indicated.
Children at the day care were to be taken to St. Luke's, which is the usual evacuation plan, the supervisor said. But the power came back and the evacuation didn't happen, the director at the Fountain Hill center, who said her name was Patti, said, before adding she wasn't authorized to speak and hung up. She refused to talk about the malfunctioning header, saying information would have to come from the main office. No one answered the phone at the children's center's main office in Allentown.
The incident was initially dispatched at 7:25 as a structure fire.
PPL Electric Utilities was showing 1,569 customers without power in Lower Saucon Township. A corporate spokesman was gathering details about 8 o'clock before providing details on the outage.
Spokesman Joe Nixon at 8:15 said PPL was down to 30 customers out, with a restoration time of 10:30 this morning. Just after 9 o'clock he said the cause of the outage was a span of wire coming down on Mountain Drive in Lower Saucon. It wasn't certain why the wire came down, he said, but crews were working to put it back up. The restoration time was pushed back to noon, he said.